|
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 eight thousand
to nine thousand five hundred 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? 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 twenty-five hundred to three
thousand 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 wave 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 fine 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, polytrichum, 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 leguminosm 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.
Hummingbirds, 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,
flycatchers 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 snowstorms 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 flocks 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 mould, 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 drier. 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 composites, 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,
watertight, 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 bedrock, 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 ruffled 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 canon 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
canon 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. |
