untraversable--no human being could climb along the divide; we had,
then, but one hope of reaching the peak, and our greatest difficulty lay
at the start. If we could climb down to the Kern side of the divide, and
succeed in reaching the base of the precipices which fell from our feet,
it really looked as if we might travel without difficulty among the
_roches moutonnées_ to the other side of the Kern Valley, and make our
attempt upon the southward flank of the great peak. One look at the
sublime white giant decided us. We looked down over the precipice, and
at first could see no method of descent. Then we went back and looked at
the road we had come up, to see if that were not possibly as bad; but
the broken surface of the rocks was evidently much better
climbing-ground than anything ahead of us. Cotter, with danger, edged
his way along the wall to the east and I to the west, to see if there
might not be some favorable point; but we both returned with the belief
that the precipice in front of us was as passable as any of it. Down it
we must.
After lying on our faces, looking over the brink, ten or twenty minutes,
I suggested that by lowering ourselves on the rope we might climb from
crevice to crevice; but we saw no shelf large enough for ourselves and
the knapsacks too. However, we were not going to give it up without a
trial; and I made the rope fast around my breast, and, looping the noose
over a firm point of rock, let myself slide gradually down to a notch
forty feet below. There was only room beside me for Cotter, so I made
him send down the knapsacks first. I then tied these together by the
straps with my silk handkerchiefs, and hung them off as far to the left
as I could reach without losing my balance, looping the handkerchiefs
over a point of rock. Cotter then slid down the rope, and, with
considerable difficulty, we whipped the noose off its resting-place
above, and cut off our connection with the upper world.
“We’re in for it now, King,” remarked my comrade, as he looked aloft,
and then down; but our blood was up, and danger added only an
exhilarating thrill to the nerves.
The shelf was hardly more than two feet wide, and the granite so smooth
that we could find no place to fasten the lasso for the next descent; so
I determined to try the climb with only as little aid as possible. Tying
it around my breast again, I gave the other end into Cotter’s hands, and
he, bracing his back against the cliff, found for himself as firm a
foothold as he could, and promised to give me all the help in his power.
I made up my mind to bear no weight unless it was absolutely necessary;
and for the first ten feet I found cracks and protuberances enough to
support me, making every square inch of surface do friction duty, and
hugging myself against the rocks as tightly as I could. When within
about eight feet of the next shelf, I twisted myself round upon the
face, hanging by two rough blocks of protruding feldspar, and looked
vainly for some further hand-hold; but the rock, besides being perfectly
smooth, overhung slightly, and my legs dangled in the air. I saw that
the next cleft was over three feet broad, and I thought possibly I
might, by a quick slide, reach it in safety without endangering Cotter.
I shouted to him to be very careful and let go in case I fell, loosened
my hold upon the rope and slid quickly down. My shoulder struck against
the rock and threw me out of balance; for an instant I reeled over upon
the verge, in danger of falling, but, in the excitement, I thrust out my
hand and seized a small alpine gooseberry-bush, the first piece of
vegetation we had seen. Its roots were so firmly fixed in the crevice
that it held my weight and saved me.
I could no longer see Cotter, but I talked to him, and heard the two
knapsacks come bumping along till they slid over the eaves above me, and
swung down to my station, when I seized the lasso’s end and braced
myself as well as possible, intending, if he slipped, to haul in slack
and help him as best I might. As he came slowly down from crack to
crack, I heard his hobnailed shoes grating on the granite; presently
they appeared dangling from the eaves above my head. I had gathered in
the rope until it was taut, and then hurriedly told him to drop. He
hesitated a moment, and let go. Before he struck the rock I had him by
the shoulder, and whirled him down upon his side, thus preventing his
rolling overboard, which friendly action he took quite coolly.
The third descent was not a difficult one, nor the fourth; but when we
had climbed down about two hundred and fifty feet, the rocks were so
glacially polished and water-worn that it seemed impossible to get any
farther. To our right was a crack penetrating the rock, perhaps a foot
deep, widening at the surface to three or four inches, which proved to
be the only possible ladder. As the chances seemed rather desperate, we
concluded to tie ourselves together, in order to share a common fate;
and with a slack of thirty feet between us, and our knapsacks upon our
backs, we climbed into the crevice, and began descending with our faces
to the cliff. This had to be done with unusual caution, for the foothold
was about as good as none, and our fingers slipped annoyingly on the
smooth stone; besides, the knapsacks and instruments kept a steady
backward pull, tending to overbalance us. But we took pains to descend
one at a time, and rest wherever the niches gave our feet a safe
support. In this way we got down about eighty feet of smooth, nearly
vertical wall, reaching the top of a rude granite stairway, which led to
the snow; and here we sat down to rest, and found to our astonishment
that we had been three hours from the summit.
After breathing a half-minute we continued down, jumping from rock to
rock, and having, by practice, become very expert in balancing
ourselves, sprang on, never resting long enough to lose the _aplomb_;
and in this manner made a quick descent over rugged _débris_ to the
crest of a snow-field, which, for seven or eight hundred feet more,
swept down in a smooth, even slope, of very high angle, to the borders
of a frozen lake.
Without untying the lasso which bound us together, we sprang upon the
snow with a shout, and glissaded down splendidly, turning now and then a
somersault, and shooting out like cannon-balls almost to the middle of
the frozen lake; I upon my back, and Cotter feet first, in a swimming
position. The ice cracked in all directions. It was only a thin,
transparent film, through which we could see deep into the lake. Untying
ourselves, we hurried ashore in different directions, lest our combined
weight should be too great a strain upon any point.
With curiosity and wonder we scanned every shelf and niche of the last
descent. It seemed quite impossible we could have come down there, and
now it actually was beyond human power to get back again. But what cared
we? “Sufficient unto the day--” We were bound for that still distant,
though gradually nearing, summit; and we had come from a cold, shadowed
cliff into deliciously warm sunshine, and were jolly, shouting, singing
songs, and calling out the companionship of a hundred echoes. Six miles
away, with no grave danger, no great difficulty, between us, lay the
base of our grand mountain. Upon its skirts we saw a little grove of
pines, an ideal bivouac, and toward this we bent our course.
After the continued climbing of the day walking was a delicious rest,
and forward we pressed with considerable speed, our hobnails giving us
firm footing on the glittering, glacial surface. Every fluting of the
great valley was in itself a considerable cañon, into which we
descended, climbing down the scored rocks, and swinging from block to
block, until we reached the level of the pines. Here, sheltered among
_roches moutonnées_, began to appear little fields of alpine grass, pale
yet sunny, soft under our feet, fragrantly jewelled with flowers of
fairy delicacy, holding up amid thickly clustered blades chalices of
turquoise and amethyst, white stars, and fiery little globes of red.
Lakelets, small but innumerable, were held in glacial basins, the striæ
and grooves of that old dragon’s track ornamenting their smooth bottoms.
One of these, a sheet of pure beryl hue, gave us much pleasure from its
lovely transparency, and because we lay down in the necklace of grass
about it and smelled flowers, while tired muscles relaxed upon warm beds
of verdure, and the pain in our burdened shoulders went away, leaving us
delightfully comfortable.
After the stern grandeur of granite and ice, and with the peaks and
walls still in view, it was relief to find ourselves again in the region
of life. I never felt for trees and flowers such a sense of intimate
relationship and sympathy. When we had no longer excuse for resting, I
invented the palpable subterfuge of measuring the altitude of the spot,
since the few clumps of low, wide-boughed pines near by were the highest
living trees. So we lay longer with less and less will to rise, and when
resolution called us to our feet, the getting-up was sorely like Rip Van
Winkle’s in the third act.
The deep, glacial cañon-flutings across which our march then lay proved
to be great consumers of time: indeed, it was sunset when we reached the
eastern ascent, and began to toil up through scattered pines, and over
trains of moraine rocks, toward the great peak. Stars were already
flashing brilliantly in the sky, and the low, glowing arch in the west
had almost vanished when we came to the upper trees, and threw down our
knapsacks to camp. The forest grew on a sort of plateau-shelf with a
precipitous front to the west,--a level surface which stretched eastward
and back to the foot of our mountain, whose lower spurs reached within a
mile of camp. Within the shelter lay a huge, fallen log, like all these
alpine woods one mass of resin, which flared up when we applied a match,
illuminating the whole grove. By contrast with the darkness outside, we
seemed to be in a vast, many-pillared hall. The stream close by afforded
water for our blessed teapot; venison frizzled with mild, appetizing
sound upon the ends of pine sticks; matchless beans allowed themselves
to become seductively crisp upon our tin plates. That supper seemed to
me then the quintessence of gastronomy, and I am sure Cotter and I must
have said some very good _après-dîner_ things, though I long ago forgot
them all. Within the ring of warmth, on elastic beds of pine-needles; we
curled up, and fell swiftly into a sound sleep.
I woke up once in the night to look at my watch, and observed that the
sky was overcast with a thin film of cirrus cloud to which the reflected
moonlight lent the appearance of a glimmering tent, stretched from
mountain to mountain over cañons filled with impenetrable darkness, only
the vaguely lighted peaks and white snow-fields distinctly seen. I
closed my eyes and slept soundly until Cotter woke me at half-past
three, when we arose, breakfasted by the light of our fire, which still
blazed brilliantly, and, leaving our knapsacks, started for the mountain
with only instruments, canteens, and luncheon.
In the indistinct moonlight climbing was very difficult at first, for we
had to thread our way along a plain which was literally covered with
glacier bowlders, and the innumerable brooks which we crossed were
frozen solid. However, our march brought us to the base of the great
mountain, which, rising high against the east, shut out the coming
daylight, and kept us in profound shadow. From base to summit rose a
series of broken crags, lifting themselves from a general slope of
_débris_. Toward the left the angle seemed to be rather gentler, and the
surface less ragged; and we hoped, by a long _détour_ round the base,
to make an easy climb up this gentler face. So we toiled on for an hour
over the rocks, reaching at last the bottom of the north slope. Here our
work began in good earnest. The blocks were of enormous size, and in
every stage of unstable equilibrium, frequently rolling over as we
jumped upon them, making it necessary for us to take a second leap and
land where we best could. To our relief we soon surmounted the largest
blocks, reaching a smaller size, which served us as a sort of stairway.
The advancing daylight revealed to us a very long, comparatively even
snow-slope, whose surface was pierced by many knobs and granite heads,
giving it the aspect of an ice-roofing fastened on with bolts of stone.
It stretched in far perspective to the summit, where already the rose of
sunrise reflected gloriously, kindling a fresh enthusiasm within us.
Immense bowlders were partly embedded in the ice just above us, whose
constant melting left them trembling on the edge of a fall. It
communicated no very pleasant sensation to see above you these immense
missiles hanging by a mere band, knowing that, as soon as the sun rose,
you would be exposed to a constant cannonade.
The east side of the peak, which we could now partially see, was too
precipitous to think of climbing. The slope toward our camp was too much
broken into pinnacles and crags to offer us any hope, or to divert us
from the single way, dead ahead, up slopes of ice and among fragments of
granite. The sun rose upon us while we were climbing the lower part of
this snow, and in less than half an hour, melting, began to liberate
huge blocks, which thundered down past us, gathering and growing into
small avalanches below.
We did not dare climb one above another, according to our ordinary mode,
but kept about an equal level, hundred feet apart, lest, dislodging the
blocks, one should hurl them down upon the other.
We climbed up smooth faces of granite, clinging simply by the cracks and
protruding crystals of feldspar, and then hewed steps up fearfully steep
slopes of ice, zigzagging to the right and left, to avoid the flying
bowlders. When midway up this slope we reached a place where the granite
rose in perfectly smooth bluffs on either side of a gorge,--a narrow cut
or walled way leading up to the flat summit of the cliff. This we scaled
by cutting ice steps, only to find ourselves fronted again by a still
higher wall. Ice sloped from its front at too steep an angle for us to
follow, but had melted in contact with it, leaving a space three feet
wide between the ice and the rock. We entered this crevice and climbed
along its bottom, with a wall of rock rising a hundred feet above us on
one side, and a thirty-foot face of ice on the other, through which
light of an intense cobalt-blue penetrated.
Reaching the upper end, we had to cut our footsteps upon the ice again,
and, having braced our backs against the granite, climbed up to the
surface. We were now in a dangerous position: to fall into the crevice
upon one side was to be wedged to death between rock and ice; to make a
slip was to be shot down five hundred feet, and then hurled over the
brink of a precipice. In the friendly seat which this wedge gave me, I
stopped to take wet and dry observations with the thermometer,--this
being an absolute preventive of a scare,--and to enjoy the view.
The wall of our mountain sank abruptly to the left, opening for the
first time an outlook to the eastward. Deep--it seemed almost
vertically--beneath us we could see the blue water of Owen’s Lake, ten
thousand feet down. The summit peaks to the north were piled in Titanic
confusion, their ridges overhanging the eastern slope with terrible
abruptness. Clustered upon the shelves and plateaus below were several
frozen lakes, and in all directions swept magnificent fields of snow.
The summit was now not over five hundred feet distant, and we started on
again with the exhilarating hope of success. But if nature had intended
to secure the summit from all assailants, she could not have planned her
defences better; for the smooth granite wall which rose above the
snow-slope continued, apparently, quite around the peak, and we looked
in great anxiety to see if there was not one place where it might be
climbed. It was all blank except in one spot; quite near us the snow
bridged across the crevice and rose in a long point to the summit of
the wall,--a great icicle-column frozen in a niche of the bluff,--its
base about ten feet wide, narrowing to two feet at the top. We climbed
to the base of this spire of ice, and, with the utmost care, began to
cut our stairway. The material was an exceedingly compacted snow,
passing into clear ice as it neared the rock. We climbed the first half
of it with comparative ease; after that it was almost vertical, and so
thin that we did not dare to cut the footsteps deep enough to make them
absolutely safe. There was a constant dread lest our ladder should break
off, and we be thrown either down the snow-slope or into the bottom of
the crevasse. At last, in order to prevent myself from falling over
backward, I was obliged to thrust my hand into the crack between the ice
and the wall, and the spire became so narrow that I could do this on
both sides, so that the climb was made as upon a tree, cutting mere
toe-holes and embracing the whole column of ice in my arms. At last I
reached the top, and, with the greatest caution, wormed my body over the
brink, and, rolling out upon the smooth surface of the granite, looked
over and watched Cotter make his climb. He came steadily up, with no
sense of nervousness, until he got to the narrow part of the ice, and
here he stopped and looked up with a forlorn face to me; but as he
climbed up over the edge the broad smile came back to his face, and he
asked me if it had occurred to me that we had, by and by, to go down
again.
We had now an easy slope to the summit, and hurried up over rocks and
ice, reaching the crest at exactly twelve o’clock. I rang my hammer upon
the topmost rock; we grasped hands, and I reverently named the grand
peak MOUNT TYNDALL.
IV
THE DESCENT OF MOUNT TYNDALL
1864
To our surprise, upon sweeping the horizon with my level, there appeared
two peaks equal in height with us, and two rising even higher. That
which looked highest of all was a cleanly cut helmet of granite upon the
same ridge with Mount Tyndall, lying about six miles south, and fronting
the desert with a bold, square bluff which rises to the crest of the
peak, where a white fold of snow trims it gracefully. Mount Whitney, as
we afterward called it, in honor of our chief, is probably the highest
land within the United States. Its summit looked glorious, but
inaccessible.
The general topography overlooked by us may be thus simply outlined. Two
parallel chains, enclosing an intermediate trough, face each other.
Across this deep, enclosed gulf, from wall to wall, juts the thin but
lofty and craggy ridge, or “divide,” before described, which forms an
important water-shed, sending those streams which enter the chasm north
of it into King’s River, those south forming the most important sources
of the Kern, whose straight, rapidly deepening valley stretches south,
carved profoundly in granite, while the King’s, after flowing
longitudinally in the opposite course for eight or ten miles, turns
abruptly west round the base of Mount Brewer, cuts across the western
ridge, opening a gate of its own, and carves a rock channel transversely
down the Sierra to the California plain.
Fronting us stood the west chain, a great mural ridge watched over by
two dominant heights, Kaweah Peak and Mount Brewer, its wonderful
profile defining against the western sky a multitude of peaks and
spires. Bold buttresses jut out through fields of ice, and reach down
stone arms among snow and _débris_. North and south of us the higher, or
eastern, summit stretched on in miles and miles of snow peaks, the
farthest horizon still crowded with their white points. East the whole
range fell in sharp, hurrying abruptness to the desert, where, ten
thousand feet below, lay a vast expanse of arid plain intersected by
low, parallel ranges, traced from north to south. Upon the one side, a
thousand sculptures of stone, hard, sharp, shattered by cold into
infiniteness of fractures and rift, springing up, mutely severe, into
the dark, austere blue of heaven; scarred and marked, except where snow
or ice, spiked down by ragged granite bolts, shields with its pale armor
these rough mountain shoulders; storm-tinted at summit, and dark where,
swooping down from ragged cliff, the rocks plunge over cañon-walls into
blue, silent gulfs.
Upon the other hand, reaching out to horizons faint and remote, lay
plains clouded with the ashen hues of death; stark, wind-swept floors
of white, and hill-ranges, rigidly formal, monotonously low, all lying
under an unfeeling brilliance of light, which, for all its strange,
unclouded clearness, has yet a vague half-darkness, a suggestion of
black and shade more truly pathetic than fading twilight. No greenness
soothes, no shadow cools the glare. Owen’s Lake, an oval of acrid water,
lies dense blue upon the brown sage-plain, looking like a plate of hot
metal. Traced in ancient beach-lines, here and there upon hill and
plain, relics of ancient lake-shore outline the memory of a cooler
past--a period of life and verdure when the stony chains were green
islands among basins of wide, watery expanse.
The two halves of this view, both in sight at once, express the highest,
the most acute, aspects of desolation--inanimate forms out of which
something living has gone forever. From the desert have been dried up
and blown away its seas. Their shores and white, salt-strewn bottoms lie
there in the eloquence of death. Sharp, white light glances from all the
mountain-walls, where in marks and polishings has been written the
epitaph of glaciers now melted and vanished into air. Vacant cañons lie
open to the sun, bare, treeless, half shrouded with snow, cumbered with
loads of broken _débris_, still as graves, except when flights of rocks
rush down some chasm’s throat, startling the mountains with harsh, dry
rattle, their fainter echoes from below followed too quickly by dense
silence.
The serene sky is grave with nocturnal darkness. The earth blinds you
with its light. That fair contrast we love in lower lands, between
bright heavens and dark, cool earth, here reverses itself with terrible
energy. You look up into an infinite vault, unveiled by clouds, empty
and dark, from which no brightness seems to ray, an expanse with no
graded perspective, no tremble, no vapory mobility, only the vast
yawning of hollow space.
With an aspect of endless remoteness burns the small, white sun, yet its
light seems to pass invisibly through the sky, blazing out with
intensity upon mountain and plain, flooding rock details with painfully
bright reflections, and lighting up the burnt sand and stone of the
desert with a strange, blinding glare. There is no sentiment of beauty
in the whole scene; no suggestion, however far remote, of sheltered
landscape; not even the air of virgin hospitality that greets us
explorers in so many uninhabited spots which by their fertility and
loveliness of grove or meadow seem to offer man a home, or us nomads a
pleasant camp-ground. Silence and desolation are the themes which nature
has wrought out under this eternally serious sky.
A faint suggestion of life clings about the middle altitudes of the
eastern slope, where black companies of pine, stunted from breathing the
hot desert air, group themselves just beneath the bottom of perpetual
snow, or grow in patches of cloudy darkness over the moraines, those
piles of wreck crowded from their pathway by glaciers long dead.
Something there is pathetic in the very emptiness of these old glacier
valleys, these imperishable tracks of unseen engines. One’s eye ranges
up their broad, open channel to the shrunken white fields surrounding
hollow amphitheatres which were once crowded with deep burdens of
snow,--the birthplace of rivers of ice now wholly melted; the dry, clear
heavens overhead blank of any promise of ever rebuilding them. I have
never seen Nature when she seemed so little “Mother Nature” as in this
place of rocks and snow, echoes and emptiness. It impresses me as the
ruins of some bygone geological period, and no part of the present
order, like a specimen of chaos which has defied the finishing hand of
Time.
Of course I see its bearings upon climate, and could read a lesson quite
glibly as to its usefulness as a condenser, and tell you gravely how
much California has for which she may thank these heights, and how
little Nevada; but looking from this summit with all desire to see
everything, the one overmastering feeling is desolation, desolation!