outline of Niagara. The total breadth is about seven hundred feet, and
the greatest height of the single fall about one hundred and ninety.
Among the islands above the brink are several beautiful cascades, where
portions of the river pour over in lace-like forms. The whole mass of
cataract is one ever-varying sheet of spray. In the early spring, when
swollen by the rapidly melted snows, the river pours over with something
like the grand volume of Niagara, but at the time of my visit it was
wholly white foam. Here and there along the brink the underlying rock
shows through, and among the islands shallow, green pools disclose the
form of the underlying trachyte. Numberless rough shelves break the
fall, but the volume is so great that they are only discovered by the
glancing outward of the foam.
The river below the falls is very deep. The right bank sinks into the
water in a clear, sharp precipice, but on the left side a narrow, pebbly
beach extends along the foot of the cliff. From the top of the wall, at
a point a quarter of a mile below the falls, a stream has gradually worn
a little stairway: thick growths of evergreens have huddled together in
this ravine.
By careful climbing we descended to the level of the river. The
trachytes are very curiously worn in vertical forms. Here and there an
obelisk, either wholly or half detached from the cañon-wall, juts out
like a buttress. Farther down, these projecting masses stand like a row
of columns upon the left bank. Above them, a solid capping of black lava
reaches out to the edge, and overhangs the river in abrupt, black
precipices. Wherever large fields of basalt have overflowed an earlier
rock, and erosion has afterward laid it bare, there is found a strong
tendency to fracture in vertical lines. The immense expansion of the
upper surface from heat seems to cause deep fissures in the mass.
Under the influence of the cool shadow of cliffs and pine, and constant
percolating of surface-waters, a rare fertility is developed in the
ravines opening upon the cañon shore. A luxuriance of ferns and mosses,
an almost tropical wealth of green leaves and velvety carpeting, line
the banks. There are no rocks at the base of the fall. The sheet of foam
plunges almost vertically into a dark, beryl-green, lake-like expanse
of the river. Immense volumes of foam roll up from the cataract-base,
and, whirling about in the eddying winds, rise often a thousand feet in
the air. When the wind blows down the cañon a gray mist obscures the
river for half a mile; and when, as is usually the case in the
afternoon, the breezes blow eastward, the foam-cloud curls over the
brink of the fall, and hangs like a veil over the upper river. On what
conditions depends the height to which the foam-cloud rises from the
base of the fall it is apparently impossible to determine. Without the
slightest wind, the cloud of spray often rises several hundred feet
above the cañon-wall, and again, with apparently the same conditions of
river and atmosphere, it hardly reaches the brink. Incessant roar,
reinforced by a thousand echoes, fills the cañon. Out of this monotone,
from time to time, rise strange, wild sounds, and now and then may be
heard a slow, measured beat, not unlike the recurring fall of breakers.
From the white front of the cataract the eye constantly wanders up to
the black, frowning parapet of lava. Angular bastions rise sharply from
the general level of the wall, and here and there isolated blocks,
profiling upon their sky line, strikingly recall barbette batteries. To
goad one’s imagination up to the point of perpetually seeing
resemblances of everything else in the forms of rocks is the most vulgar
vice of travellers. To refuse to see the architectural suggestions upon
the Snake cañon, however, is to administer a flat snub to one’s fancy.
The whole edge of the cañon is deeply cleft in vertical crevasses. The
actual brink is usually formed of irregular blocks and prisms of lava,
poised upon their ends in an unstable equilibrium, ready to be tumbled
over at the first leverage of the frost. Hardly an hour passes without
the sudden boom of one of those rock-masses falling upon the ragged
_débris_ piles below.
Night is the true time to appreciate the full force of the scene. I lay
and watched it many hours. The broken rim of the basin profiled itself
upon a mass of drifting clouds where torn openings revealed gleams of
pale moonlight and bits of remote sky trembling with misty stars.
Intervals of light and blank darkness hurriedly followed each other. For
a moment the black gorge would be crowded with forms. Tall cliffs,
ramparts of lava, the rugged outlines of islands huddled together on the
cataract’s brink, faintly luminous foam breaking over black rapids, the
swift, white leap of the river, and a ghostly, formless mist through
which the cañon-walls and far reach of the lower river were veiled and
unveiled again and again. A moment of this strange picture, and then a
rush of black shadow, when nothing could be seen but the breaks in the
clouds, the basin-rim, and a vague, white centre in the general
darkness.
After sleeping on the nightmarish brink of the falls, it was no small
satisfaction to climb out of this Dantean gulf and find myself once more
upon a pleasantly prosaic foreground of sage. Nothing more effectually
banishes a melotragic state of the mind than the obtrusive ugliness and
abominable smell of this plant. From my feet a hundred miles of it
stretched eastward. A half-hour’s walk took me out of sight of the
cañon, and as the wind blew westward, only occasional indistinct
pulsations of the fall could be heard. The sky was bright and cloudless,
and arched in cheerful vacancy over the meaningless disk of the desert.
I walked for an hour, following an old Indian trail which occasionally
approached within seeing distance of the river, and then, apparently
quite satisfied, diverged again into the desert. When about four miles
from the Shoshone, it bent abruptly to the north, and led to the cañon
edge. Here again the narrow gorge widened into a broad theatre,
surrounded, as before, by black, vertical walls, and crowded over its
whole surface by rude piles and ridges of volcanic rock. The river
entered it from the east through a magnificent gateway of basalt, and,
having reached the middle, flowed on either side of a low, rocky island,
and plunged in two falls into a deep green basin. A very singular ridge
of the basalt projected like an arm almost across the river, enclosing
within its semi-circle a bowl three hundred feet in diameter and two
hundred feet deep. Within this the water was of the same peculiar
beryl-green, dappled here and there by masses of foam which swam around
and around with a spiral tendency toward the centre. To the left of the
island half the river plunged off an overhanging lip, and fell about one
hundred and fifty feet, the whole volume reaching the surface of the
basin many feet from the wall. The other half has worn away the edge,
and descends in a tumbling cascade at an angle of about forty-five
degrees. The river at this point has not yet worn through the fields of
basaltic lava which form the upper four hundred feet of the plain.
Between the two falls it cuts through the remaining beds of basalt, and
has eroded its channel a hundred feet into underlying porphyritic
trachyte. The trachyte erodes far more easily than the basalt, and its
resultant forms are quite unlike those of the black lava. The trachyte
islands and walls are excavated here and there in deep caves, leaving
island masses in the forms of mounds and towers. In general, spherical
outlines predominate, while the erosion of the basalt results always in
sharp, perpendicular cliffs, with a steeply inclined talus of ragged
_débris_.
The cliffs around the upper cataract are inferior to those of the
Shoshone. While the level of the upper plain remains nearly the same,
the river constantly deepens the channel in its westward course. In
returning from the upper fall, I attempted to climb along the very edge
of the cliff, in order to study carefully the habits of the basalt; but
I found myself in a labyrinth of side crevasses which were cut into the
plain from a hundred to a thousand feet back from the main wall. These
recesses were usually in the form of an amphitheatre, with black walls
two hundred feet high, and a bottom filled with immense fragments of
basalt rudely piled together.
By dint of hard climbing I reached the actual brink in a few places, and
saw the same general features each time: the cañon successively widening
and narrowing, its walls here and there approaching each other and
standing like pillars of a gateway; the river alternately flowing along
smooth, placid reaches of level, and rushing swiftly down rocky
cascades. Here and there along the cliff are disclosed mouths of black
caverns, where the lava seems to have been blown up in the form of a
great blister, as if the original flow had poured over some pool of
water, and, converted into steam by contact with the hot rock, had been
blown up bubble-like by its immense expansion.
I continued my excursions along the cañon west of the Shoshone. About a
mile below the fall a very fine promontory juts sharply out and projects
nearly to the middle of the cañon. Climbing with difficulty along its
toppling crest, I reached a point which I found composed of immense,
angular fragments piled up in dangerous poise. Eastward, the
battlemented rocks around the falls limited the view; but westward I
could see down long reaches of river, where islands of trachyte rose
above white cascades. A peculiar and fine effect is noticeable upon the
river during all the midday. The shadow of the southern cliff is cast
down here and there, completely darkening the river, but often defining
itself upon the water. The contrast between the rich, gem-like green of
the sunlit portions and the deep violet shadow of the cliff is of
extreme beauty. The Snake River, deriving its volume wholly from the
melting of the mountain snows, is a direct gauge of the annual advance
of the sun. In June and July it is a tremendous torrent, carrying a full
half of the Columbia. From the middle of July it constantly shrinks,
reaching its minimum in midwinter. At the lowest, it is a river equal to
the Sacramento or Connecticut.
After ten days devoted to walking around the neighborhood and studying
the falls and rocks, we climbed to our wagon, and rested for a farewell
look at the gorge. It was with great relief that we breathed the free
air of the plain, and turned from the rocky cañon where darkness, and
roar, and perpetual cliffs had bounded our senses, and headed southward,
across the noiseless plain. Far ahead rose a lofty, blue barrier, a
mountain-wall, marbled upon its summit by flecks of perpetual snow. A
deep notch in its profile opened a gateway. Toward this, for leagues
ahead of us, a white thread in the gray desert marked the winding of our
road. Those sensitively organized creatures, the mules, thrilled with
relief at their escape from the cañons, pressed forward with a vigor
that utterly silenced the customary poppings of the whip, and expurgated
the language of the driver from his usual breaking of the Third
Commandment.
The three great falls of America--Niagara, Shoshone, and Yosemite--all,
happily, bearing Indian names, are as characteristically different as
possible. There seems little left for a cataract to express.
Niagara rolls forward with something like the inexorable sway of a
natural law. It is force, power; forever banishing before its
irresistible rush all ideas of restraint.
No sheltering pine or mountain distance of up-piled Sierras guards the
approach to the Shoshone. You ride upon a waste,--the pale earth
stretched in desolation. Suddenly you stand upon a brink, as if the
earth had yawned. Black walls flank the abyss. Deep in the bed a great
river fights its way through labyrinths of blackened ruins, and plunges
in foaming whiteness over a cliff of lava. You turn from the brink as
from a frightful glimpse of the Inferno, and when you have gone a mile
the earth seems to have closed again; every trace of cañon has vanished,
and the stillness of the desert reigns.
As you stand at the base of those cool walls of granite that rise to the
clouds from the green floor of Yosemite, a beautiful park, carpeted with
verdure, expands from your feet. Vast and stately pines band with their
shadows the sunny reaches of the pure Merced. An arch of blue bridges
over from cliff to cliff. From the far summit of a wall of pearly
granite, over stains of purple and yellow,--leaping, as it were, from
the very cloud,--falls a silver scarf, light, lace-like, graceful,
luminous, swayed by the wind. The cliffs’ repose is undisturbed by the
silvery fall, whose endlessly varying forms of wind-tossed spray lend an
element of life to what would otherwise be masses of inanimate stone.
The Yosemite is a grace. It is an adornment. It is a ray of light on the
solid front of the precipice.
From Yosemite our course was bent toward the Merced Obelisk. An
afternoon in early July brought us to camp in the self-same spot where
Cotter and I had bivouacked in the storm more than two years before. I
remembered the crash and wail of those two dreary nights, the thunderous
fulness of tempest beating upon cliffs, and the stealthy, silent
snow-burial; and perhaps to the memory of that bitter experience was
added the contrasting force of to-day’s beauty.
A warm afternoon sun poured through cloudless skies into one rocky
amphitheatre. The little alpine meadow and full, arrowy brook were
flanked upon either side by broad, rounded masses of granite, and
margined by groups of vigorous upland trees: firs for the most part, but
watched over here and there by towering pines and great, aged junipers
whose massive red trunks seemed welded to the very stone.
It was altogether exhilarating; even Little Billy, the gray horse, found
it so, and devoted more time to practical jokes upon thick-headed mules
than to the rich and tempting verdure; nor did the high, cool air
banish from his tender heart a glowing Platonic affection for our brown
mare Sally.
To the ripened charms of middle age Sally united something more than the
memory of youth; she was remarkably plump and well-preserved; her figure
firm and elastic, and she did not hesitate to display it with many
little arts. In presence of her favored Billy she drew deep sighs, and
had quite an irresistible fashion of turning sadly aside and moving away
among trees alone, as if she had no one to love her--a wile never
failing to bring him to her side and elicit such attention as smoothing
her mane or even a pressure of lips upon her brow. And woe to the
emotional mule who ventured to cross our little meadow just to feel for
a moment the soft comfort of her presence. With the bitterness of a
rejected suit he always bore away shoe-prints of jealous Billy.
He led her quietly down to the brook, and never drank a drop until the
mare was done; then they paid a call at camp, nosing about among the
kettles with familiar freedom, nibbling playfully at dish-towel and
coffee-pot, and when we threw sticks at them trotted off as closely as
if they had been harnessed together. In quiet, moonlit hours, before I
went to bed, I saw them still side by side, her head leaning over his
withers; Billy at _qui vive_ staring dramatically with pointed ears into
forest depths, a true and watchful guardian.
A little reconnoitring had shown us the most direct way to the Obelisk,
whose sharp summit looked from the moraine to west of us as grand and
alluring as we had ever thought it.
There was in our hope of scaling this point something more than mere
desire to master a difficult peak. It was a station of great
topographical value, the apex of many triangles, and, more than all,
would command a grander view of the Merced region than any other summit.
July eleventh, about five o’clock in the afternoon, Gardiner and I
strapped packs upon our shoulders. My friend’s load consisted of the
Temple transit, his blanket, and a great tin cup; mine was made up of
field-glass, compass, level, blanket, and provisions for both, besides
the barometer, which, as usual, I slung over one shoulder.
For the first time that year we found ourselves slowly zigzagging to and
fro, following a grade with that peculiarly deliberate gait to which
mountaineering experience very soon confines one. Black firs and
thick-clustered pines covered in clumps all the lower slope, but,
ascending, we came more and more into open ground, walking on glacial
_débris_ among trains of huge bowlders and occasional thickets of
slender, delicate young trees. Emerging finally into open granite
country, we came full in sight of our goal, whose great western
precipice rose sheer and solid above us.
From the south base of the Obelisk a sharp mural ridge curves east,
surrounding an amphitheatre whose sloping, rugged sides were
picturesquely mottled in snow and stone. From the summit of this ridge
we knew we should look over into the upper Merced basin, a great,
billowy, granite depression lying between the Merced group and Mount
Lyell; the birthplace of all those ice rivers and deep-cañoned torrents
which join in the Little Yosemite and form the river Merced. Toward this
we pressed, hurrying rapidly, as the sun declined, in hopes of making
our point before darkness should obscure the _terra incognita_ beyond.
It put us at our best to hasten over the rough, rudely piled blocks and
up cracks among solid bluffs of granite, but with the sun fully half an
hour high we reached the Obelisk foot and looked from our ridge-top
eastward into the new land.
From our feet granite and ice in steep, roof-like curves fell abruptly
down to the Merced Cañon brink, and beyond, over the great gulf, rose
terraces and ridges of sculptured stone, dressed with snow-field, one
above another, up to the eastern rank of peaks whose sharp, solid forms
were still in full light.
From below, it is always a most interesting feature of the mountaineer’s
daily life to watch fading sunlight upon the summit-rocks and snow.
There is something peculiarly charming in the deep carmine flush and in
the pale gradations of violet and cool blue-purple into which it
successively fades. We were now in the very midst of this alpine glow.
Our rocky amphitheatre, opening directly to the sun, was crowded full of
this pure, red light; snow-fields warmed to deepest rose, gnarled stems
of dead pines were dark vermilion, the rocks yellow, and the vast body
of the Obelisk at our left one spire of gold piercing the sapphire
zenith. Eastward, far below us, the Illilluette basin lay in a
peculiarly mild haze, its deep carpet of forest warmed into faint
bronze, and the bare domes and rounded, granite ridges which everywhere
rise above the trees were yellow, of a soft, creamy tint. Farther down,
every foothill was perceptibly reddened under the level beams. Sunlight
reflecting from every object shot up to us, enriching the brightness of
our amphitheatre.
We drank and breathed the light, its mellow warmth permeating every
fibre. We spread our blankets under the lee of an overhanging rock,
sheltered from the keen east wind, and in full view of the broad western
horizon.
After a short half-hour of this wonderful light the sun rested for an
instant upon the Coast ranges, and sank, leaving our mountains suddenly
dead, as if the very breath of life had ebbed away, cold, gray shadows
covering their rigid bodies, and pale sheets of snow half shrouding
their forms.
For a full hour after the sun went down we did little else than study
the western sky, watching with greatest interest a wonderful permanence
and singular gradation of lingering light. Over two hundred miles of
horizon a low stratum of pure orange covered the sky for seven or eight
degrees; above that another narrow band of beryl-green, and then the
cool, dark evening blue.
I always notice, whenever one gets a very wide view of remote horizon
from some lofty mountain-top, the sky loses its high domed appearance,
the gradations reaching but a few degrees upward from the earth,
creating the general form of an inverted saucer. The orange and beryl
bands occupied only about fifteen degrees in altitude, but swept around
nearly from north to south. It was as if a wonderfully transparent and
brilliant rainbow had been stretched along the sky line. At eleven the
colors were still perceptible, and at midnight, when I rose to observe
the thermometer, they were gone, but a low faint zone of light still
lingered.
At gray dawn we were up and cooking our rasher of bacon, and soon had
shouldered our instruments and started for the top.
The Obelisk is flattened, and expands its base into two sharp, serrated
ridges, which form its north and south edges. The broad faces turned to
the east and west are solid and utterly inaccessible, the latter being
almost vertical, the former quite too steep to climb. We started,
therefore, to work our way up the south edge, and, having crossed a
little ravine from whose head we could look down eastward upon steep
thousand-foot _névé_, and westward along the forest-covered ridge up
which we had clambered, began in good earnest to mount rough blocks of
granite.
The edge here is made of immense, broken rocks poised on each other in
delicate balance, vast masses threatening to topple over at a touch.
This blade has from a distance a considerably smooth and even
appearance, but we found it composed of pinnacles often a hundred feet
high, separated from the main top by a deep, vertical cleft. More than
once, after struggling to the top of one of these pinnacles, we were
obliged to climb down the same way in order to avoid the notches.
Finally, when we had reached the brink of a vertical _cul-de-sac_, the
edge no longer afforded us even a foothold. There were left but the
smooth, impossible western face and the treacherous, cracked front of
the eastern precipice. We were driven out upon the latter, and here
forced to climb with the very greatest care, one of us always in advance
making sure of his foothold, the other passing up instruments by hand,
and then cautiously following.
In this way we spent nearly a full hour going from crack to crack,
clinging by the least protruding masses of stone, now and then looking
over our shoulders at the wreck of granite, the slopes of ice, and
frozen lake thousands of feet below, and then upward to gather courage
from the bold, red spike which still rose grandly above us.
At last we struggled up to what we had all along believed the summit,
and found ourselves only on a minor turret, the great needle still a
hundred feet above. From rock to rock and crevice to crevice we made our
way up a fractured edge until within fifty feet of the top, and here its
sharp angle rose smooth and vertical, the eastern precipice carved in a
flat face upon the one side, the western broken by a smoothly curved
recess like the corner of a room. No human being could scale the edge.
An arctic bluebird fluttered along the eastern slope in vain quest of a
foothold, and alighted, panting, at our feet. One step more and we stood
together on a little, detached pinnacle, where, by steadying ourselves
against the sharp, vertical Obelisk edge, we could rest, although the
keen sense of steepness below was not altogether pleasing.
About seven feet across the open head of a _cul-de-sac_ (a mere recess
in the west face) was a vertical crack riven into the granite not more
than three feet wide, but as much as eight feet deep; in it were wedged
a few loose bowlders; below, it opened out into space. At the head of
this crack a rough crevice led up to the summit.
Summoning nerve, I knew I could make the leap, but the life and death
question was whether the _débris_ would give way under my weight, and
leave me struggling in the smooth recess, sure to fall and be dashed to
atoms.
Two years we had longed to climb that peak, and now, within a few yards
of the summit, no weakheartedness could stop us. I thought, should the
_débris_ give way, by a very quick turn and powerful spring I could
regain our rock in safety.
There was no discussion, but, planting my foot on the brink, I sprang,
my side brushing the rough, projecting crag. While in the air I looked
down, and a picture stamped itself on my brain never to be forgotten.
The _débris_ crumbled and moved. I clutched both sides of the cleft,
relieving all possible weight from my feet. The rocks wedged themselves
again, and I was safe.