THE GLACIER MEADOWS
After the lakes on the High Sierra come the glacier meadows. They are
smooth, level, silky lawns, lying embedded in the upper forests, on the
floors of the valleys, and along the broad backs of the main dividing
ridges, at a height of about 8000 to 9500 feet above the sea.
They are nearly as level as the lakes whose places they have taken, and
present a dry, even surface free from rock-heaps, mossy bogginess, and
the frowsy roughness of rank, coarse-leaved, weedy, and shrubby
vegetation. The sod is close and fine, and so complete that you cannot
see the ground; and at the same time so brightly enameled with flowers
and butterflies that it may well be called a garden-meadow, or
meadow-garden; for the plushy sod is in many places so crowded with
gentians, daisies, ivesias, and various species of orthocarpus that the
grass is scarcely noticeable, while in others the flowers are only
pricked in here and there singly, or in small ornamental rosettes.
The most influential of the grasses composing the sod is a delicate
calamagrostis with fine filiform leaves, and loose, airy panicles that
seem to float above the flowery lawn like a purple mist. But, write as
I may, I cannot give anything like an adequate idea of the exquisite
beauty of these mountain carpets as they lie smoothly outspread in the
savage wilderness. What words are fine enough to picture them I to what
shall we liken them? The flowery levels of the prairies of the old
West, the luxuriant savannahs of the South, and the finest of
cultivated meadows are coarse in comparison. One may at first sight
compare them with the carefully tended lawns of pleasure-grounds; for
they are as free from weeds as they, and as smooth, but here the
likeness ends; for these wild lawns, with all their exquisite fineness,
have no trace of that painful, licked, snipped, repressed appearance
that pleasure-ground lawns are apt to have even when viewed at a
distance. And, not to mention the flowers with which they are
brightened, their grasses are very much finer both in color and
texture, and instead of lying flat and motionless, matted together like
a dead green cloth, they respond to the touches of every breeze,
rejoicing in pure wildness, blooming and fruiting in the vital light.
Glacier meadows abound throughout all the alpine and subalpine regions
of the Sierra in still greater numbers than the lakes. Probably from
2500 to 3000 exist between latitude 36° 30′ and 39°, distributed, of
course, like the lakes, in concordance with all the other glacial
features of the landscape.
On the head waters of the rivers there are what are called “Big
Meadows,” usually about from five to ten miles long. These occupy the
basins of the ancient ice-seas, where many tributary glaciers came
together to form the grand trunks. Most, however, are quite small,
averaging perhaps but little more than three fourths of a mile in
length.
One of the very finest of the thousands I have enjoyed lies hidden in
an extensive forest of the Two-leaved Pine, on the edge of the basin of
the ancient Tuolumne Mer de Glace, about eight miles to the west of
Mount Dana.
Imagine yourself at the Tuolumne Soda Springs on the bank of the river,
a day’s journey above Yosemite Valley. You set off northward through a
forest that stretches away indefinitely before you, seemingly unbroken
by openings of any kind. As soon as you are fairly into the woods, the
gray mountain-peaks, with their snowy gorges and hollows, are lost to
view. The ground is littered with fallen trunks that lie crossed and
recrossed like storm-lodged wheat; and besides this close forest of
pines, the rich moraine soil supports a luxuriant growth of
ribbon-leaved grasses—bromus, triticum, calamagrostis, agrostis, etc.,
which rear their handsome spikes and panicles above your waist. Making
your way through the fertile wilderness,—finding lively bits of
interest now and then in the squirrels and Clark crows, and perchance
in a deer or bear,—after the lapse of an hour or two vertical bars of
sunshine are seen ahead between the brown shafts of the pines, showing
that you are approaching an open space, and then you suddenly emerge
from the forest shadows upon a delightful purple lawn lying smooth and
free in the light like a lake. This is a glacier meadow. It is about a
mile and a half long by a quarter of a mile wide. The trees come
pressing forward all around in close serried ranks, planting their feet
exactly on its margin, and holding themselves erect, strict and orderly
like soldiers on parade; thus bounding the meadow with exquisite
precision, yet with free curving lines such as Nature alone can draw.
With inexpressible delight you wade out into the grassy sun-lake,
feeling yourself contained in one of Nature’s most sacred chambers,
withdrawn from the sterner influences of the mountains, secure from all
intrusion, secure from yourself, free in the universal beauty. And
notwithstanding the scene is so impressively spiritual, and you seem
dissolved in it, yet everything about you is beating with warm,
terrestrial, human love and life delightfully substantial and familiar.
The resiny pines are types of health and steadfastness; the robins
feeding on the sod belong to the same species you have known since
childhood; and surely these daisies, larkspurs, and goldenrods are the
very friend-flowers of the old home garden. Bees hum as in a harvest
noon, butterflies waver above the flowers, and like them you lave in
the vital sunshine, too richly and homogeneously joy-filled to be
capable of partial thought. You are all eye, sifted through and through
with light and beauty. Sauntering along the brook that meanders
silently through the meadow from the east, special flowers call you
back to discriminating consciousness. The sod comes curving down to the
water’s edge, forming bossy outswelling banks, and in some places
overlapping countersunk boulders and forming bridges. Here you find
mats of the curious dwarf willow scarce an inch high, yet sending up a
multitude of gray silky catkins, illumined here and there with, the
purple cups and bells of bryanthus and vaccinium.
Go where you may, you everywhere find the lawn divinely beautiful, as
if Nature had fingered and adjusted every plant this very day. The
floating grass panicles are scarcely felt in brushing through their
midst, so flue are they, and none of the flowers have tall or rigid
stalks. In the brightest places you find three species of gentians with
different shades of blue, daisies pure as the sky, silky leaved ivesias
with warm yellow flowers, several species of orthocarpus with blunt,
bossy spikes, red and purple and yellow; the alpine goldenrod,
pentstemon, and clover, fragrant and honeyful, with their colors massed
and blended. Parting the grasses and looking more closely you may trace
the branching of their shining stems, and note the marvelous beauty of
their mist of flowers, the glumes and pales exquisitely penciled, the
yellow dangling stamens, and feathery pistils. Beneath the lowest
leaves you discover a fairy realm of mosses,—hypnum, dicranum,
polytriclium, and many others,—their precious spore-cups poised
daintily on polished shafts, curiously hooded, or open, showing the
richly ornate peristomas worn like royal crowns. Creeping liverworts
are here also in abundance, and several rare species of fungi,
exceedingly small, and frail, and delicate, as if made only for beauty.
Caterpillars, black beetles, and ants roam the wilds of this lower
world, making their way through miniature groves and thickets like
bears in a thick wood.
And how rich, too, is the life of the sunny air! Every leaf and flower
seems to have its winged representative overhead. Dragon-flies shoot in
vigorous zigzags through the dancing swarms, and a rich profusion of
butterflies—the leguminosae of insects—make a fine addition to the
general show. Many of these last are comparatively small at this
elevation, and as yet almost unknown to science; but every now and then
a familiar vanessa or papilio comes sailing past. Humming-birds, too,
are quite common here, and the robin is always found along the margin
of the stream, or out in the shallowest portions of the sod, and
sometimes the grouse and mountain quail, with their broods of precious
fluffy chickens. Swallows skim the grassy lake from end to end,
fly-catchers come and go in fitful flights from the tops of dead spars,
while woodpeckers swing across from side to side in graceful festoon
curves,—birds, insects, and flowers all in their own way telling a deep
summer joy.
The influences of pure nature seem to be so little known as yet, that
it is generally supposed that complete pleasure of this kind,
permeating one’s very flesh and bones, unfits the student for
scientific pursuits in which cool judgment and observation are
required. But the effect is just the opposite. Instead of producing a
dissipated condition, the mind is fertilized and stimulated and
developed like sun-fed plants. All that we have seen here enables us to
see with surer vision the fountains among the summit-peaks to the east
whence flowed the glaciers that ground soil for the surrounding forest;
and down at the foot of the meadow the moraine which formed the dam
which gave rise to the lake that occupied this basin before the meadow
was made; and around the margin the stones that were shoved back and
piled up into a rude wall by the expansion of the lake ice during long
bygone winters; and along the sides of the streams the slight hollows
of the meadow which mark those portions of the old lake that were the
last to vanish.
I would fain ask my readers to linger awhile in this fertile
wilderness, to trace its history from its earliest glacial beginnings,
and learn what we may of its wild inhabitants and visitors. How happy
the birds are all summer and some of them all winter; how the pouched
marmots drive tunnels under the snow, and how fine and brave a life the
slandered coyote lives here, and the deer and bears! But, knowing well
the difference between reading and seeing, I will only ask attention to
some brief sketches of its varying aspects as they are presented
throughout the more marked seasons of the year.
The summer life we have been depicting lasts with but little abatement
until October, when the night frosts begin to sting, bronzing the
grasses, and ripening the leaves of the creeping heathworts along the
banks of the stream to reddish purple and crimson; while the flowers
disappear, all save the goldenrods and a few daisies, that continue to
bloom on unscathed until the beginning of snowy winter. In still nights
the grass panicles and every leaf and stalk are laden with frost
crystals, through which the morning sunbeams sift in ravishing
splendor, transforming each to a precious diamond radiating the colors
of the rainbow. The brook shallows are plaited across and across with
slender lances of ice, but both these and the grass crystals are melted
before midday, and, notwithstanding the great elevation of the meadow,
the afternoons are still warm enough to revive the chilled butterflies
and call them out to enjoy the late-flowering goldenrods. The divine
alpenglow flushes the surrounding forest every evening, followed by a
crystal night with hosts of lily stars, whose size and brilliancy
cannot be conceived by those who have never risen above the lowlands.
Thus come and go the bright sun-days of autumn, not a cloud in the sky,
week after week until near December. Then comes a sudden change. Clouds
of a peculiar aspect with a slow, crawling gait gather and grow in the
azure, throwing out satiny fringes, and becoming gradually darker until
every lake-like rift and opening is closed and the whole bent firmament
is obscured in equal structureless gloom. Then comes the snow, for the
clouds are ripe, the meadows of the sky are in bloom, and shed their
radiant blossoms like an orchard in the spring. Lightly, lightly they
lodge in the brown grasses and in the tasseled needles of the pines,
falling hour after hour, day after day, silently, lovingly,—all the
winds hushed,—glancing and circling hither, thither, glinting against
one another, rays interlocking in flakes as large as daisies; and then
the dry grasses, and the trees, and the stones are all equally abloom
again. Thunder-showers occur here during the summer months, and
impressive it is to watch the coming of the big transparent drops, each
a small world in itself,—one unbroken ocean without islands hurling
free through the air like planets through space. But still more
impressive to me is the coming of the snow-flowers,—falling stars,
winter daisies,—giving bloom to all the ground alike. Raindrops blossom
brilliantly in the rainbow, and change to flowers in the sod, but snow
comes in full flower direct from the dark, frozen sky.
The later snow-storms are oftentimes accompanied by winds that break up
the crystals, when the temperature is low, into single petals and
irregular dusty fragments; but there is comparatively little drifting
on the meadow, so securely is it embosomed in the woods. From December
to May, storm succeeds storm, until the snow is about fifteen or twenty
feet deep, but the surface is always as smooth as the breast of a bird.
Hushed now is the life that so late was beating warmly. Most of the
birds have gone down below the snow-line, the plants sleep, and all the
fly-wings are folded. Yet the sun beams gloriously many a cloudless day
in midwinter, casting long lance shadows athwart the dazzling expanse.
In June small flecks of the dead, decaying sod begin to appear,
gradually widening and uniting with one another, covered with creeping
rags of water during the day, and ice by night, looking as hopeless and
unvital as crushed rocks just emerging from the darkness of the glacial
period. Walk the meadow now! Scarce the memory of a flower will you
find. The ground seems twice dead. Nevertheless, the annual
resurrection is drawing near. The life-giving sun pours his floods, the
last snow-wreath melts, myriads of growing points push eagerly through
the steaming mold, the birds come back, new wings fill the air, and
fervid summer life comes surging on, seemingly yet more glorious than
before.
This is a perfect meadow, and under favorable circumstances exists
without manifesting any marked changes for centuries. Nevertheless,
soon or late it must inevitably grow old and vanish. During the calm
Indian summer, scarce a sand-grain moves around its banks, but in
flood-times and storm-times, soil is washed forward upon it and laid in
successive sheets around its gently sloping rim, and is gradually
extended to the center, making it dryer. Through a considerable period
the meadow vegetation is not greatly affected thereby, for it gradually
rises with the rising ground, keeping on the surface like water-plants
rising on the swell of waves. But at length the elevation of the
meadow-land goes on so far as to produce too dry a soil for the
specific meadow-plants, when, of course, they have to give up their
places to others fitted for the new conditions. The most characteristic
of the newcomers at this elevation above the sea are principally
sun-loving gilias, eriogonae, and compositae, and finally forest-trees.
Henceforward the obscuring changes are so manifold that the original
lake-meadow can be unveiled and seen only by the geologist.
Generally speaking, glacier lakes vanish more slowly than the meadows
that succeed them, because, unless very shallow, a greater quantity of
material is required to fill up their basins and obliterate them than
is required to render the surface of the meadow too high and dry for
meadow vegetation. Furthermore, owing to the weathering to which the
adjacent rocks are subjected, material of the finer sort, susceptible
of transportation by rains and ordinary floods, is more abundant during
the meadow period than during the lake period. Yet doubtless many a
fine meadow favorably situated exists in almost prime beauty for
thousands of years, the process of extinction being exceedingly slow,
as we reckon time. This is especially the case with meadows
circumstanced like the one we have described—embosomed in deep woods,
with the ground rising gently away from it all around, the network of
tree-roots in which all the ground is clasped preventing any rapid
torrential washing. But, in exceptional cases, beautiful lawns formed
with great deliberation are overwhelmed and obliterated at once by the
action of land-slips, earthquake avalanches, or extraordinary floods,
just as lakes are.
In those glacier meadows that take the places of shallow lakes which
have been fed by feeble streams, glacier mud and fine vegetable humus
enter largely into the composition of the soil; and on account of the
shallowness of this soil, and the seamless, water-tight, undrained
condition of the rock-basins, they are usually wet, and therefore
occupied by tall grasses and sedges, whose coarse appearance offers a
striking contrast to that of the delicate lawn-making kind described
above. These shallow-soiled meadows are oftentimes still further
roughened and diversified by partially buried moraines and swelling
bosses of the bed-rock, which, with the trees and shrubs growing upon
them, produce a striking effect as they stand in relief like islands in
the grassy level, or sweep across in rugged curves from one forest wall
to the other.
Throughout the upper meadow region, wherever water is sufficiently
abundant and low in temperature, in basins secure from flood-washing,
handsome bogs are formed with a deep growth of brown and yellow
sphagnum picturesquely ruined with patches of kalmia and ledum which
ripen masses of beautiful color in the autumn. Between these cool,
spongy bogs and the dry, flowery meadows there are many interesting
varieties which are graduated into one another by the varied conditions
already alluded to, forming a series of delightful studies.
HANGING MEADOWS
Another, very well-marked and interesting kind of meadow, differing
greatly both in origin and appearance from the lake-meadows, is found
lying aslant upon moraine-covered hillsides trending in the direction
of greatest declivity, waving up and down over rock heaps and ledges,
like rich green ribbons brilliantly illumined with tall flowers. They
occur both in the alpine and subalpine regions in considerable numbers,
and never fail to make telling features in the landscape. They are
often a mile or more in length, but never very wide—usually from thirty
to fifty yards. When the mountain or cañon side on which, they lie dips
at the required angle, and other conditions are at the same time
favorable, they extend from above the timber line to the bottom of a
cañon or lake basin, descending in fine, fluent lines like cascades,
breaking here and there into a kind of spray on large boulders, or
dividing and flowing around on either side of some projecting islet.
Sometimes a noisy stream goes brawling down through them, and again,
scarcely a drop of water is in sight. They owe their existence,
however, to streams, whether visible or invisible, the wildest
specimens being found where some perennial fountain, as a glacier or
snowbank or moraine spring sends down its waters across a rough sheet
of soil in a dissipated web of feeble, oozing rivulets. These
conditions give rise to a meadowy vegetation, whose extending roots
still more obstruct the free flow of the waters, and tend to dissipate
them out over a yet wider area. Thus the moraine soil and the necessary
moisture requisite for the better class of meadow plants are at times
combined about as perfectly as if smoothly outspread on a level
surface. Where the soil happens to be composed of the finer qualities
of glacial detritus and the water is not in excess, the nearest
approach is made by the vegetation to that of the lake-meadow. But
where, as is more commonly the case, the soil is coarse and bouldery,
the vegetation is correspondingly rank. Tall, wide-leaved grasses take
their places along the sides, and rushes and nodding carices in the
wetter portions, mingled with the most beautiful and imposing
flowers,—orange lilies and larkspurs seven or eight feet high, lupines,
senecios, aliums, painted-cups, many species of mimulus and pentstemon,
the ample boat-leaved _veratrum alba_, and the magnificent alpine
columbine, with spurs an inch and a half long. At an elevation of from
seven to nine thousand feet showy flowers frequently form the bulk of
the vegetation; then the hanging meadows become hanging gardens.
In rare instances we find an alpine basin the bottom of which is a
perfect meadow, and the sides nearly all the way round, rising in
gentle curves, are covered with moraine soil, which, being saturated
with melting snow from encircling fountains, gives rise to an almost
continuous girdle of down-curving meadow vegetation that blends
gracefully into the level meadow at the bottom, thus forming a grand,
smooth, soft, meadow-lined mountain nest. It is in meadows of this sort
that the mountain beaver (_Haplodon_) loves to make his home,
excavating snug chambers beneath the sod, digging canals, turning the
underground waters from channel to channel to suit his convenience, and
feeding the vegetation.
Another kind of meadow or bog occurs on densely timbered hillsides
where small perennial streams have been dammed at short intervals by
fallen trees. Still another kind is found hanging down smooth, flat
precipices, while corresponding leaning meadows rise to meet them.
There are also three kinds of small pot-hole meadows one of which is
found along the banks of the main streams, another on the summits of
rocky ridges, and the third on glacier pavements, all of them
interesting in origin and brimful of plant beauty.