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[An excerpt from a letter to a
friend, written in 1873. Editor.]
AFTER reaching Turlock, I
sped afoot over the stubble fields and through miles of brown hemizonia and
purple erigeron, to Hopeton, conscious of little more than that the town was
behind and beneath me, and the mountains above and before me; on through the
oaks and chaparral of the foothills to Coulterville; and then ascended the
first great mountain step upon which grows the sugar pine. Here I slackened
pace, for I drank the spicy, resiny wind, and beneath the arms of this noble
tree I felt that I was safely home. Never did pine trees seem so dear. How
sweet was their breath and their song, and how grandly they winnowed the
sky! I tingled my fingers among their tassels, and rustled my feet among
their brown needles and burrs, and was exhilarated and joyful beyond all I
can write.
When I reached Yosemite, all
the rocks seemed talkative, and more telling and lovable than ever. They are
dear friends, and seemed to have warm blood gushing through their granite
flesh; and I love them with a love intensified by long and close
companionship. After I had bathed in the bright river, sauntered over the
meadows, conversed with the domes, and played with the pines, I still felt
blurred and weary, as if tainted in some way with the sky of your streets. I
determined, therefore, to run out for a while to say my prayers in the
higher mountain temples. "The days are sunful," I said, "and, though now
winter, no great danger need be encountered, and no sudden storm will block
my return, if I am watchful."
The morning after this
decision, I started up the caņon of Tenaya, caring little about the quantity
of bread I carried; for, I thought, a fast and a storm and-ft difficult
caņon were just the medicine I needed. When I passed Mirror Lake, I scarcely
noticed it, for I was absorbed in the great Tissiack - her crown a mile away
in the hushed azure; her purple granite drapery flowing in soft and graceful
folds down to m feet, embroidered gloriously around with deep, shadowy
forest. I have gazed on Tissiack a thousand times - in days of solemn
storms, and when her form shone divine with the jewelry of winter, or was
veiled in living clouds; and I have heard her voice of winds, and snowy,
tuneful waters when floods were falling; yet never did her soul reveal
itself more impressively than now. I hung about her skirts, lingering
timidly, until the higher mountains and glaciers compelled me to push up the
caņon.
This caņon is accessible only
to mountaineers, and I was anxious to carry my barometer and clinometer
through it, to obtain sections and altitudes, so I chose it as the most
attractive highway. After I had passed the tall groves that stretch a mile
above Mirror Lake, and scrambled around the Tenaya Fall, which is just at
the head of the lake groves, I crept through the dense and spiny chaparral
that plushes the roots of the mountains here for miles in warm green, and
was ascending a precipitous rock-front, smoothed by glacial action, when I
suddenly fell - for the first time since I touched foot to Sierra rocks.
After several somersaults, I became insensible from the shock, and when
consciousness returned I found myself wedged among short, stiff bushes,
trembling as if cold, not injured in the slightest.
Judging by the sun, I could
not have been insensible very long; probably not a minute, possibly an hour;
and I could not remember what made me fall, or where I had fallen from; but
I saw that if I had rolled a little further, my mountain-climbing would have
been finished, for just beyond the bushes the caņon wall steepened and I
might have fallen to the bottom. "There," said I, addressing my feet, to
whose separate skill I had learned to trust night and day on any mountain,
"that is what you get by intercourse with stupid town stairs, and dead
pavements." I felt degraded and worthless. I had not yet reached the most
difficult portion of the caņon, but I determined to guide my humbled body
over the most nerve- trying places I could find; for I was now awake, and
felt confident that the last of the town fog had been shaken from both head
and feet.
I camped at the mouth of a
narrow gorge which is cut into the bottom of the main caņon, determined to
take earnest exercise next day. No plushy boughs did my ill-behaved bones
enjoy that night, nor did my bumped head get a spicy cedar plume pillow
mixed with flowers. I slept on a naked boulder, and when I awoke all my
nervous trembling was gone.
The gorged portion of the
caņon, in which I spent all the next day, is about a mile and a half in
length; and I passed the time in tracing the action of the forces that
determined this peculiar bottom gorge, which is an abrupt, ragged-walled,
narrow-throated caņon, formed in the bottom of the wide-mouthed, smooth, and
beveled main caņon. I will not stop now to tell you more; some day you may
see it, like a shadowy line, from Cloud's Rest. In high water, the stream
occupies all the bottom of the gorge, surging and chafing in glorious power
from wall to wall. But the sound of the grinding was low as I entered the
gorge, scarcely hoping to be able to pass through its entire length. By cool
efforts, along glassy, ice-worn slopes, I reached the upper end in a little
over a day, but was compelled to pass the second night in the gorge, and in
the moonlight I wrote you this short pencil-letter in my notebook: -
The moon is looking down into
the caņon, and how marvelously the great rocks kindle to her light! Every
dome, and brow, and swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if
lighted with snow. I am now only a mile from last night's camp; and have
been climbing and sketching all day in this difficult but instructive gorge.
It is formed in the bottom of the main caņon, among the roots of Cloud's
Rest. It begins at the filled-up lake-basin where I camped last night, and
ends a few hundred yards above, in another basin of the same kind. The walls
everywhere are craggy and vertical, and in some places they overlean. It is
only from twenty to sixty feet wide, and not, though black and broken
enough, the thin, crooked mouth of some mysterious abyss; but it was eroded,
for in many places I saw its solid, seamless floor.
I am sitting on a big stone,
against which the stream divides, and goes brawling by in rapids on both
sides; half of my rock is white in the light, half in shadow. As I look from
the opening jaws of this shadowy gorge, South Dome is immediately in front -
high in the stars, her face turned from the moon, with the rest of her body
gloriously muffled in waved folds of granite. On the left, sculptured from
the main Cloud's Rest ridge, are three magnificent rocks, sisters of the
great South Dome. On the right is the massive, moonlit front of Mount
Watkins, and between, low down in the furthest distance, is Sentinel Dome,
girdled and darkened with forest. In the near foreground Tenaya Creek is
singing against boulders that are white with snow and moonbeams. Now look
back twenty yards, and you will see a waterfall fair as a spirit; the
moonlight just touches it, bringing it into relief against a dark background
of shadow. A little to the left, and a dozen steps this side of the fall, a
flickering light marks my camp - and a precious camp it is. A huge,
glacier-polished slab, falling from the smooth, glossy flank of Cloud's
Rest, happened to settle on edge against the wall of the gorge. I did not
know that this slab was glacier-polished until I lighted my fire. Judge of
my delight. I think it was sent here by an earthquake. It is about twelve
feet square. I wish I could take it home [Muir at this time was making
Yosemite Valley his home. Editor.] for a hearthstone. Beneath this slab is
the only place iii this torrent-swept gorge where I could find sand
sufficient for a bed.
I expected to sleep on the
boulders, for I spent most of the afternoon on the slippery wall of the
caņon, endeavoring to get around this difficult part of the gorge, and was
compelled to hasten down here for water before dark. I shall sleep soundly
on this sand; half of it is mica. Here, wonderful to behold, are a few green
stems of prickly rubus, and a tiny grass. They are here to meet us. Ay, even
here in this darksome gorge, "frightened and tormented" with raging torrents
and choking avalanches of snow. Can it be? As if rubus and the grass leaf
were not enough of God's tender prattle words of love, which we so much need
in these mighty temples of power, yonder in the "benmost bore" are two
blessed adiantums. Listen to them! How wholly infused with God is this one
big word of love that we call the world! Good-night. Do you see the
fire-glow on my ice-smoothed slab, and on my two ferns and the rubus and
grass panicles? And do you hear how sweet a sleep-song the fall and cascades
are singing?
The water-ground chips and
knots that I found fastened between the rocks kept my fire alive all through
the night. Next morning I rose nerved and ready for another day of sketching
and noting, and any form of climbing. I escaped from the gorge about noon,
after accomplishing some of the most delicate feats of mountaineering I ever
attempted; and here the caņon is all broadly open again - the floor
luxuriantly forested with pine, and spruce, and silver fir, and brown-trunked
librocedrus. The walls rise in Yosemite forms, and Tenaya Creek comes down
seven hundred feet in a white brush of foam. This is a little Yosemite
valley. It is about two thousand feet above the level of the main Yosemite,
and about twenty- four hundred below Lake Tenaya.
I found the lake frozen, and
the ice was so clear and unruffled that the surrounding mountains and the
groves that look down upon it were reflected almost as perfectly as I ever
beheld them in the calm evening mirrors of summer. At a little distance, it
was difficult to believe the lake frozen at all; and when I walked out on
it, cautiously stamping at short intervals to test the strength of the ice,
I seemed to walk mysteriously, without adequate faith, on the surface of the
water. The ice was so transparent that I could see through it the
beautifully wave-rippled, sandy bottom, and the scales of mica glinting back
the down- pouring light. When I knelt down with my face close to the ice,
through which the sunbeams were pouring, I was delighted to discover myriads
of Tyndall's six-rayed water flowers, magnificently colored.
A grand old mountain mansion
is this Tenaya region! In the glacier period it was a mer de glace, far
grander than the mer de glace of Switzerland, which is only about half a
mile broad. The Tenaya mer de glace was not less than two miles broad, late
in the glacier epoch, when all the principal dividing crests were bare; and
its depth was not less than fifteen hundred feet. Ice-streams from Mounts
Lye!! and Dana, and all the mountains between, and from the nearer Cathedral
Peak, flowed hither, welded into one, and worked together. After eroding
this Tenaya Lake basin, and all the splendidly sculptured rocks and
mountains that surround and adorn it, and the great Tenaya Caņon, with its
wealth of all that makes mountains sublime, they were welded with the vast
South, Lyell, and Illilouette glaciers on one side, and with those of
Hoffman on the other - thus forming a portion of a yet grander mer de glace
in Yosemite Valley.
I reached the Tenaya Caņon,
on my way home, by coming in from the northeast, rambling down over the
shoulders of Mount Watkins, touching bottom a mile above Mirror Lake. From
thence home was but a saunter in the moonlight.
After resting one day, and
the weather continuing calm, I ran up over the left shoulder of South Dome
and down in front of its grand split face to make some measurements,
completed my work, climbed to the right shoulder, struck off along the ridge
for Cloud's Rest, and reached the topmost heave of her sunny wave in ample
time to see the sunset.
Cloud's Rest is a thousand
feet higher than Tissiack. It is a wavelike crest upon a ridge, which begins
at Yosemite with Tissiack, and runs continuously eastward to the thicket of
peaks and crests around Lake Tenaya. This lofty granite wall is bent this
way and that by the restless and weariless action of glaciers just as if it
had been made of dough. But the grand circumference of mountains and forests
are coming from far and near, densing into one close assemblage; for the
sun, their god and father, with love ineffable, is glowing a sunset
farewell. Not one of all the assembled rocks or trees seemed remote. How
impressively their faces shone with responsive love!
I ran home in the moonlight
with firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong. Down through the
junipers; down through the firs; now in jet shadows, now in white light;
over sandy moraines and bare, clanking rocks; past the huge ghost of South
Dome rising weird through the firs; past the glorious fall of Nevada, the
groves of Illilouette; through the pines of the valley; beneath the bright
crystal sky blazing with stars. All of this mountain wealth in one day! -
one of the rich ripe days that enlarge one's life; so much of the sun upon
one side of it, so much of the moon and stars on the other. |
