 CHAPTER 1 OF STEEP TRAILS Moral improvers have calls to preach. I have a friend who has a call to plow, and woe to the daisy sod or azalea thicket that falls under the savage redemption of his keen steel shares. Not content with the so-called subjugation of every terrestrial bog, rock, and moorland, he would feign discover some method of reclamation applicable to the ocean and the sky, that in due calendar time they might be brought to bud and blossom as the rose. Our efforts are of no avail when we seek to turn his attention to wild roses, or to the fact that both the ocean and sky are already about as rosy as possible, the one with stars, the other with dulls and foam and wild light. The practical developments of his culture are orchards and clover fields, wearing a smiling benevolent aspect, truly excellent in their way, though a near view discloses something barbarous in them all. Wildness charms not, my friend, charm it never so wisely. And whatsoever may be the character of his heaven, his earth seems only a chaos of agricultural possibilities calling for grubbing hoes and manures. Sometimes I venture to approach him with the plea for wildness, when he good-naturedly shakes a big mellow apple in my face, reiterating his favorite aphorism, culture is an orchard apple, nature is a crab. That all culture, however, is equally destructive and inappreciative. As your skies and crystal waters find loving recognition, and few there be who would welcome the acts among mountain pines, or would care to apply any correction to the tones and costumes of mountain waterfalls. Nevertheless the barbarous notion is almost universally entertained by civilized man, that there is in all the manufacturers of nature something essentially coarse, which can and must be eradicated by human culture. I was, therefore, delighted in finding that the wild wool growing upon mountain sheep in the neighborhood of Mount Shasta was much finer than the average grades of cultivated wool. This fine discovery was made some three months ago, while hunting among the Shasta sheep between Shasta and Lower Klamath Lake. Three fleeces were obtained, one that belonged to a large ram about four years old, another to a U about the same age, and another to a yearling lamb. After partying their beautiful wool on the side, and many places along the back, shoulders and hips, and examining it closely with my lens, I shouted, Well done for wildness, wild wool is finer than tame. My companions stooped down and examined the fleeces for themselves, pulling out tufts and ringlets, spinning them between their fingers, and measuring the length of the staple, each in turn paying tribute to wildness. It was finer, and no mistake, finer than Spanish merino. Wild wool is finer than tame. Here, said I, is an argument for fine wildness that needs no explanation. Not that such arguments are by any means rare. For all wildness is finer than tameness, but because fine wool is appreciable by everybody alike, from the most speculative president of national wool growers' associations, all the way down to the good wife, spinning by her ingleside. Nature is a good mother, and sees well to the clothing of her bairns, birds with smoothly imbricated feathers, beetles with shining jackets, and bears with shaggy fur. In the tropical south, where the sun warms like a fire, they are allowed to go thinly clad, but in the snowy northland she takes care to clothe warmly. The squirrel has socks and mittens, and a tail broad enough for a blanket. The grouse is densely feathered down to the ends of his toes, and the wild sheep, besides his undergarment of fine wool, has a thick overcoat of hair that sheds off both the snow and the rain. Other provisions and adaptations in the dresses of animals, relating less to climate than to the more mechanical circumstances of life, are made with the same consummate skill that characterizes all the love work of nature. Land, water, and air, jagged rocks, muddy ground, sand beds, forests, underbrush, grassy plains, etc., are considered in all their possible combinations while the clothing of her beautiful wildlings is preparing. No matter what the circumstances of their lives may be, she never allows them to go dirty or ragged. The mole, living always in the dark and in the dirt, is yet as clean as the otter, or the wave-washed seal, and our wild sheep, wading in snow, roaming through bushes and leaping among jagged, storm-beaten cliffs, wears a dress so exquisitely adapted to its mountain life that it is always found as unruffled and stainless as a bird. On leaving the Shasta hunting grounds, I selected a few specimen tufts and brought them away with the view to making more leisurely examinations, but owing to the imperfectness of the instruments at my command, the results thus far obtained must be regarded only as rough approximations. As already stated, the clothing of our wild sheep is composed of fine wool and coarse hair. The hairs are from about 2 to 4 inches long, mostly of a dull bluish gray color, though varying somewhat with the seasons. In general characteristics, they are closely related to the hairs of the deer and antelope, being light, spongy, and elastic, with a highly polished surface, and though somewhat ridged and spiraled, like wool, they do not manifest the slightest tendency to felt, or become taggy. A hair two and a half inches long, which is perhaps near the average length, will stretch about one fourth of an inch before breaking. The diameter decreases rapidly, both at the top and bottom, but is maintained throughout the greater portion of the length with a fair degree of regularity. The slender tapering point in which the hairs terminate is nearly black, but owing to its fineness as compared with the main trunk, the quantity of blackness is not sufficient to affect greatly the general color. The number of hairs growing upon a square inch is about 10,000. The number of wool fibers is about 25,000, or two and a half times that of the hairs. The wool fibers are white and glossy, and beautifully spired into ringlets. The average length of the staple is about an inch and a half. A fiber of this length, when growing undisturbed, down among the hairs, measures about an inch, and hence the degree of curliness may easily be inferred. I regret exceedingly that my instruments do not enable me to measure the diameter of the fibers in order that their degrees of fineness might be definitely compared with each other and with the finest of the domestic breeds, but that the three wild fleeces under consideration are considerably finer than the average grades of merino shipped from San Francisco is, I think, unquestionable. When the fleece is parted and looked into with a good lens, the skin appears of a beautiful pale yellow color, and the delicate wool fibers are seen growing up among the strong hairs, like grass among stalks of corn. Every individual fiber being protected about especially and effectively as if enclosed in a separate husk. Wild wool is too fine to stand by itself, the fibers being about as frail and invisible as the floating threads of spiders, while the hairs against which they lean stand erect like hazel ones. But notwithstanding their great dissimilarity in size and appearance, the wool and hair are forms of the same thing. Modified in just that way and to just that degree, that renders them most perfectly subservient to the well-being of the sheep. Furthermore, it will be observed that these wild modifications are entirely distinct from those which are brought chancingly into existence through the accidents and caprices of culture. The former being inventions of God for the attainment of definite ends. Like the modifications of limbs, the fin for swimming, the wing for flying, the foot for walking, so the fine wool for warmth, the hair for additional warmth and to protect the wool, and both together for a fabric to wear well in mountain roughness and wash well in mountainous storms. The effects of human culture upon wild wool are analogous to those produced upon wild roses. In the one case, there is an abnormal development of petals at the expense of the stamens. In the other, an abnormal development of wool at the expense of the hair. Garden roses frequently exhibit stamens in which the transmutation to petals may be observed in various stages of accomplishment, and analogously the fleeces of tame sheep occasionally contain a few wild hairs that are undergoing transmutation to wool. Even wild wool presents here and there a fiber that appears to be in a state of change. In the course of my examinations of the wild fleeces mentioned above, three fibers were found that were wool at one end and hair at the other. This however does not necessarily imply imperfection or any process of change similar to that caused by human culture. Fiber lilies contain parts variously developed into stamens at one end, petals at the other, as the constant and normal condition. These half wool, half hair fibers may therefore subserve some fixed requirement essential to the perfection of the whole, or they may simply be the fine boundary lines where an exact balance between the wool and the hair is attained. I have been offering samples of mountain wool to my friends, demanding in return that the fineness of wildness be fairly recognized and confessed, but the returns are deplorably tame. The first question asked is, now, truly, wild sheep, wild sheep have you any wool, while they peer curiously down among the hairs through lenses and spectacles? Yes, wild sheep you have wool, but Mary's lamb had more. In the name of use, how many wild sheep think you would be required to furnish wool sufficient for a pair of socks? I endeavored to point out the irrelevancy of the latter question, arguing that wild wool was not made for man, but for sheep, and that, however deficient as clothing for other animals, it is just the thing for the brave mountain-dweller that wears it. Saying, however, as all this appears, the quantity question rises again and again in all its commonplace tameness. For in my experience, it seems well nigh impossible to obtain a hearing on behalf of nature from any other standpoint than that of human use. White flocks yield more flannel per sheep than the wild, therefore it is claimed that culture has improved upon wildness. And so it has as far as flannel is concerned, but all to the contrary as far as a sheep's dress is concerned. If every wild sheep inhabiting the Sierra were to put on tame wool, probably only a few would survive the dangers of a single season. With their fine limbs muffled and buried beneath a tangle of hairless wool, they would become short-winded, and fall an easy prey to the strong mountain-woolves. In descending precipices they would be thrown out of balance and killed by their taggy wool catching upon sharp points of rocks. Disease would also be brought on by the dirt, which always finds a lodgement in tame wool, and by the draggled and water-soaked condition into which it falls during stormy weather. No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness, as that which regards the world as made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant, and crystal, controverts it in the plainest terms, yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged. I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal, the presence of every other animal has been recognized. Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other. But with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality. No matter therefore what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds. Were it not for the exercise of individualizing cares on the part of nature, the universe would be felted together like a fleece of tame wool. But we are governed more than we know and most when we are wildest. Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways with one another and through the midst of one another, killing and being killed, eating and being eaten in harmonious proportions and quantities. And it is right that we should thus reciprocally make use of one another, rob, cook, and consume to the utmost of our healthy abilities and desires. Stars attract one another as they are able and harmony results. Wild lambs eat as many flowers as they can find or desire and men and wolves eat the lambs to just the same extent. This consumption of one another in its various modifications is a kind of culture varying with the degree of directness with which it is carried out. But we should be careful not to ascribe to such culture any improving qualities upon those on whom it is brought to bear. The water ocel plucks moss from the riverbank to build its nest, but it does not improve the moss by plucking it. We pluck feathers from birds and less directly wool from wild sheep for the manufacture of clothing and cradle nests without improving the wool for the sheep or the feathers for the bird that wore them. When a hawk pounces upon a linnit and proceeds to pull out its feathers, preparatory to making a meal, the hawk may be said to be cultivating the linnit and he certainly does effect an improvement as far as hawk food is concerned. But what of the songster? He ceases to be a linnit as soon as he is snatched from the woodland choir, and when hawk-like we snatch the wild sheep from its native rock, and instead of eating and wearing it at once, carry it home and breed the hair out of its wool and the bones out of its body, it ceases to be a sheep. These breeding and plucking processes are similarly improving as regards the secondary uses aimed at, and although the one requires but a few minutes for its accomplishment the other many years or centuries, they are essentially alike. We eat wild oysters alive with great directness, waiting for no cultivation and leaving scarce a second of distance between the shell and the lip. But we take wild sheep home and subject them to the many extended processes of husbandry and finish by boiling them in a pot, a process which completes all sheep improvements as far as man is concerned. It will be seen therefore that wild wool and tame wool, wild sheep and tame sheep, are terms not properly comparable, nor are they in any correct sense to be considered as bearing any antagonism toward each other. They are different things, planned and accomplished for wholly different purposes. Illustrative examples bearing upon this interesting subject may be multiplied indefinitely, for they abound everywhere in the plant and animal kingdoms wherever culture has reached. Recurring for a moment to apples, the beauty and completeness of a wild apple tree living its own life in the woods is heartily acknowledged by all those who have been so happy as to form its acquaintance. The fine wild frequency of its fruit is unrivaled, but in the great question of quantity as human food, wild apples are found wanting. Man therefore takes the tree from the woods, manures and prunes and graphs, plans and guesses adds a little of this and that, selects and rejects until apples of every conceivable size and softness are produced like nut galls in response to the irritating punctures of insects. Orchard apples are to me the most eloquent words that culture has ever spoken, but they reflect no imperfection upon nature's spicy crab. Every cultivated apple is a crab, not improved but cooked, variously softened and swelled out in the process, mellowed, sweetened, spiced, and rendered pulpy and food full, but as utterly unfit for the uses of nature as a metal are killed and plucked and roasted. Give to nature every cultured apple, codling, pippin, russet, and every sheep so laboriously compounded, muffled south-downs, harry cotswolds, wrinkled marinos, and she would throw the one to her caterpillars, the other to her wolves. It is now some 3600 years since Jacob kissed his mother and set out across the plains of Padan Aram to begin his experiments upon the flocks of his uncle Laban, and notwithstanding the high degree of excellence he attained as a wool grower and the innumerable painstaking efforts subsequently made by individuals and associations in all kinds of pastures and climates, we still seem to be as far from definite and satisfactory results as we ever were. In one breed the wool is apt to wither and crinkle like hay on a sun-beaten hillside. In another it is lodged and matted together like the lush tangled grass of a maneuvered meadow. In one the staple is deficient in length, in another in fineness, while in all there is a constant tendency toward disease, rendering various washings and dippings indispensable to prevent its falling out. The problem of the quality and quantity of the carcass seems to be as doubtful and as far removed from a satisfactory solution as to that of the wool. Desirable breeds blundered upon by long series of groping experiments are often found to be unstable and subject to disease. Bots, foot rot, blind staggers, etc. causing infinite trouble, both among breeders and manufacturers. Would it not be well, therefore, for someone to go back as far as possible and take a fresh start? The source or sources, once the various breeds were derived, is not positively known, but there can be hardly any doubt of there being descendants of the four or five wild species so generally distributed throughout the mountainous portions of the globe. The marked differences between the wild and domestic species being already accounted for by the known variability of the animal and by the long series of painstaking selection to which all its characteristics have been subjected. No other animal seems to yield so submissively to the manipulations of culture. Jacob controlled the color of his flocks merely by causing them to stare at objects of the desired hue and, possibly, marinos may have caught their wrinkles from the perplexed brows of their breeders. The California species, ovus montana, is a noble animal, weighing when full grown some three hundred and fifty pounds and is well worthy the attention of wool growers as a point from which to make a new departure for pure wildness is the one great want both of men and of sheep and of wild wool read by Dennis Sayers in Modesto California for LibriVox. Section 2 of Steep Trails This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org. Steep Trails by John Muir Chapter 2 A Geologists' Winter Walk After reaching Turlock I sped a foot over the stubble fields and through miles of brown Amazonia and purple Origeron 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 seem to have warm blood gushing through their granite flesh. And I loved them with a love intensified by long and close compendianship. 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 save 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 canyon of Tenaya, carrying little about the quantity of bread I carried, for I thought a fast and a storm and a difficult canyon were just the medicine I needed. When I passed Mirror Lake I scarcely noticed it, for I was absorbed in the great Tissac, her crown a mile away in the hushed azure, her purple granite drapery, flowing in soft and graceful folds down to my feet, embroidered gloriously around with deep shadowy forest. I have gazed on Tissac 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, tombful 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 canyon. This canyon 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 Tanaya Fall, which is just at the head of the lake groves, I crept through the dense and spiny Chaperral that plushes the roots of the mountains here for miles in warm green, and was ascending a precipitous rock front smooth 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 canyon 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 canyon, 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 canyon, determined to take earnest exercise next day. No plushy bows 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 canyon, 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 canyon formed in the bottom of the wide-mouthed, smooth, and beveled main canyon. I will not stop now to tell you more. Someday you may see it, like a shadowy line from clouds 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 canyon 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 canyon, among the roots of clouds 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 and 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 clouds 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, Tanaya 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 clouds 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 for a hearthstone. Beneath this slab is the only place in 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 canyon, 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 the 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. I, even here in this dark-sim 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 mickey 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-smooth 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, nerv'd, 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 canyon is all broadly open again. The floor luxuriously forested with pine and spruce, and silver fir, and ground-trunked lobosodrus. 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 looked 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 downpouring 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 tendles, six-rayed waterflowers, magnificently colored. A grand old mountain mansion is this Tenaya region. In the Glacier period it was a mer de glas, far grander than the mer de glas of Switzerland, which is only about half a mile broad. The Tenaya mer de glas was not less than two miles broad, late in the Glacier epic, when all the principal dividing crests were bare, and its depth was not less than 1500 feet. Ice streams from mountains Lyle 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 canyon, with its wealth of all that makes mountains sublime. They were welded into the vast south Lyle and Liloet glaciers on the one side and with those of Hoffman on the other, thus forming a portion of a yet grander mer de glas in Yosemite valley. I reached the Tenaya canyon on my way home by coming in from the northeast, rambling down over the shoulders of Mount Watkins, touching Badon 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 Tissac. It is a wave-like crest upon a ridge which begins at Yosemite with Tissac 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 worryless 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, dancing 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 face is shown 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 furs, 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 furs, past the glorious fall of Nevada, the grove sub-illelwet, through the pines of the valleys, 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. End of Chapter 2, read by Dennis Sayers in Modesto, California, for LibriVox. Chapter 3 of Steep Trails. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Michelle Montano. Steep Trails by John Muir. Chapter 3, Summer Days at Mount Shasta. Mount Shasta rises in solitary grandeur from the edge of a comparatively low and lightly sculptured lava plain near the northern extremity of the Sierra, and maintains a far more impressive and commanding individuality than any other mountain within the limits of California. Go where you may within a radius of from 50 to 100 miles or more. There stands before you the colossal cone of Shasta, clad in ice and snow, the one grand unmistakable landmark, the pole star of the landscape. Far to the southward, Mount Whitney lifts his granite summit four or five hundred feet higher than Shasta, but it is nearly snowless during the late summer, and is so feebly individualized that the traveler may search for it in vain among the many rival peaks crowded along the axis of the range to the north and south of it, which all alike are crumbling residual masses brought into relief in the degradation of the general mass of the range. The highest point on Mount Shasta, as determined by the State Geological Survey, is 14,440 feet above mean tide. That of Whitney, computed from fewer observations, is about 14,900 feet. But in as much as the average elevation of the plain out of which Shasta rises is only about 4,000 feet above the sea, while the actual base of the peak of Mount Whitney lies at an elevation of 11,000 feet, the individual height of the former is about two and a half times as great as that of the latter. Approaching Shasta from the south, one obtains glimpses of its snowy cone here and there through the trees from the tops of the hills and ridges, but it is not until Strawberry Valley is reached where there is a grand out opening of the forest that Shasta is seen in all its glory. From base to crown, clearly revealed with its wealth of woods and waters and fountains snow, rejoicing in the bright mountain sky and radiating beauty on all the subject landscape like a sun. Standing in a fringing thicket of purple sporea, in the immediate foreground is a smooth expanse of green meadow with its meandering stream, one of the smaller affluence of the Sacramento. Then a zone of dark, close forest, its countless spires of pine and fur rising above one another on the swelling base of the mountain in glorious array, and over all the great white cones sweeping far into the thin, keen sky, meadow, forest, and grand icy summit, harmoniously blending and making one sublime picture evenly balanced. The main lines of the landscape are immensely bold and simple and so regular that it needs all its shaggy wealth of woods and chaperral and its finely tinted ice and snow and brown jetting crags to keep it from looking conventional. In general views of the mountain, three distinct zones may be readily defined. The first which may be called the chaperral zone extends around the base in a magnificent sweep nearly a hundred miles in length on its lower edge and with a breadth of about seven miles. It is a dense growth of chaperral from three to six or eight feet high, composed chiefly of manzanita, cherry, chinkapin, and several species of sinophis called deerbrush by the hunters, forming when in full bloom one of the most glorious flower beds conceivable. The continuity of this flowery zone is interrupted here and there, especially on the south side of the mountain by wide swaths of coniferous trees, chiefly the sugar in yellow pines, Douglas spruce, silver fir, and incense cedar, many specimens of which are 200 feet high and five to seven feet in diameter. Golden rods, asteris, gillias, lilies, and lupines, with many other less conspicuous plants occur in warm sheltered openings in these lower woods, making charming gardens of wildness where bees and butterflies are at home and many a shy bird and squirrel. The next hire is the fir zone made up almost exclusively of two species of silver fir. It is from two to three miles wide, has an average elevation above the sea of some 6,000 feet on its lower edge and 8,000 on its upper, and is the most regular and best defined of the three. The alpine zone has a rugged, straggling growth of storm-beaten dwarf pines, pinus albicollis, which forms the upper edge of the timberline. This species reaches an elevation of about 9,000 feet, but at this height the tops of the trees rise only a few feet into the thin frosty air, and are closely pressed and shorn by wind and snow. Yet they hold on bravely and put forth an abundance of beautiful purple flowers and produce cones and seeds. Down towards the edge of the fir belt they stand erect, forming small, well-formed trunks, and are associated with the taller two-leafed and mountain pines and the beautiful Williamson spruce. Breanthus, a beautiful flowering heathwort, flourishes a few hundred feet above the timberline, accompanied with chalmia and sporea. Likens enliven the faces of the cliffs with their bright colors, and in some of the warmer nooks of the rocks, up to a height of 11,000 feet, there are a few tops of dwarf daisies, wallflowers, and penstemons. But, notwithstanding these bloom freely, they make no appreciable show at a distance, and the stretches of rough brown lava beyond the storm-beaten trees seem as bare of vegetation as the great snowfields and glaciers of the summit. Shasta is a fire mountain, an old volcano gradually accumulated and built up into the blue deep of the sky by successive eruptions of ashes and molten lava, which shot high in the air and falling and darkening showers and flowing from chasms and craters grew outward and upward like the trunk of a naughty bulging tree. Not in one grand convulsion was Shasta given birth, nor in any one special period of volcanic storm and stress, though mountains more than a thousand feet in height have been cast up like molehills in a night, quick contributions to the wealth of the landscapes, and most emphatic statements on the part of nature of the gigantic character of the power that dwells beneath the dull, dead-looking surface of the earth. But sections cut by the glaciers, displaying some of the internal framework of Shasta, show that comparatively long periods of quiescence intervened between many distinct eruptions, during which the cooling lavas ceased to flow and took their places as permanent additions to the bulk of the growing mountain. Thus with alternate haste and deliberation, eruptions succeeded eruption, until Mount Shasta surpassed even its present sublime height. Then followed a strange contrast. The glacial winter came on. The sky that so often had been darkened with storms of cinders and ashes, and lighted by the glare of volcanic fires, was filled with crystal snow-flowers, which, loading the cooling mountain, gave birth to glaciers that, uniting edge to edge at length formed one grand conical glacier. A down-crawling mantle of ice upon a fountain of smoldering fire, crushing and grinding its brown flinty lavas, and thus degrading and remodeling the entire mountain from summit to base. How much denudation and degradation has been affected, we have no means of determining, the porous, crumbling rocks being ill-adapted for the reception and preservation of glacial inscriptions. The summit is now a mass of ruins, and all the finer striations have been effaced from the flanks by postglacial weathering, while the irregularity of its lavas as regards susceptibility to erosion and the disturbance caused by inter- and postglacial eruptions have obscured or obliterated those heavier characters of the glacial record found so clearly inscribed upon the granite pages of the High Sierra, between latitude thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, and thirty-nine degrees. This much, however, is plain, that the summit of the mountain was considerably lowered, and the sides were deeply grooved and fluted while it was a center of dispersal for the glaciers of the circumjacent region. And when at length the glacial period began to draw near its close, the ice mantle was gradually melted off around the base of the mountain, and in receding and breaking up into its present fragmentary condition, the irregular heaps and rings of moraine matter were stored upon its flanks on which the forests are growing. The glacial erosion of most of the Shasta lavas gives rise to detritus composed of rough subangular boulders of moderate size and porous gravel and sand, which yields freely to the transporting power of running water. Several centuries ago, immense quantities of this lighter material were washed down from the higher slopes by a flood of extraordinary magnitude, caused probably by the sudden melting of the ice and snow during an eruption, giving rise to the deposition of conspicuous delta-like beds around the base. And it is upon these flood beds of moraine soil, thus suddenly and simultaneously laid down and joined edge to edge, that the flowery chaparral is growing. Thus, by forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive, nature accomplishes her beneficent designs, now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water, and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life, forest and garden, with all their wealth of fruit and flowers, the air stirred into one universal hum with rejoicing insects, a milky way of wings and petals, girdling the newborn mountain like a cloud, as if the vivifying sunbeams beating against its sides had broken into a foam of plant bloom and bees. But with such grand displays as nature is making here, how grand are her reservations bestowed only upon those who devotedly seek them. Beneath the smooth and snowy surface, the fountain fires are still aglow, to blaze forth afresh at their appointed times. The glaciers, looking so still and small at a distance, represented by the artist with a patch of white paint laid on by a single stroke of his brush, are still flowing onward, unhalting with deep crystal currents, sculpturing the mountain with stern, resistless energy. How many caves and fountains that no eye has yet seen lie with all their fine furniture deep down in the darkness, and how many shy, wild creatures are at home beneath the grateful lights and shadows of the woods, rejoicing in their fullness of perfect life. Standing on the edge of the strawberry meadows in the sun days of summer, not a foot or feather or leaf seems to stir, and the grand, towering mountain with all its inhabitants appears in rest, calm as a star. Yet how profound is the energy ever in action, and how great is the multitude of claws and teeth, wings and eyes, wide awake and at work and shining. Going into the blessed wilderness, the blood of the plants throbbing beneath the life-giving sunshine seems to be heard and felt. Plant growth goes on before our eyes, and every tree and bush and flower is seen as a hive of restless industry. The deeps of the sky are modeled with singing wings of every color and tone. Clouds of brilliant, crusidae, dancing and swirling in joyous rhythm, golden-barred vespidae, butterflies, grating cicadas, and jolly rattling grasshoppers, fairly enameling the light and shaking all the air into music. Happy fellows they are, every one of them, blowing tiny pipe and trumpet, plodding and prancing at work or at play. Though winter holds the summit, shasta in summer is mostly a massy, bossy mound of flowers, colored like the alpine glow that flushes the snow. There are miles of wild roses, pink bells of huckleberry and sweet manzanita, every bell a honey cup, plants that tell of the north and of the south. Tall, knotting lilies, the crimson sarcoads, rhododendron, cassiope, and blessed linea, flocks, calicanthus, plumb, cherry, crotegus, spiraea, mints and clovers in endless variety, avesia, larkspur, and columbine, golden aplopapus, linocyrus, bahia, wietia, arnica, brodie, etc., making sheets and beds of light edgings of bloom in lavish abundance for the myriads of the air dependent on their bounty. The common honey bees, gone wild in this sweet wilderness, gather tons of honey into the hollows of the trees and rocks, clamoring eagerly through bramble and huckle bloom, shaking the clustered bells of the generous manzanita, now humming aloft among polliny willows and furs, now down on the ashy ground among small gillias and buttercups, and anon plunging into banks of snow cherry and buckthorn. They consider the lilies and roll into them, pushing their blunt polliny faces against them like babies on their mother's bosom, and fondly too, with eternal love does mother nature clasp her small bee babies and suckle them, multitudes at once, on her warm shasta breast. Besides the common honey bee, there are many others here, fine, burly mossy fellows, such as were nourished on the mountains, many a flowery century before the advent of the domestic species, bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees, and leaf cutters, butterflies too, and moths of every size and pattern, some wide-winged like bats, flapping slowly and sailing in easy curves, others like small flying violets, shaking about loosely in short zigzag flights close to the flowers, feasting in plenty night and day. Deer in great abundance come to Shasta from the warmer foothills every spring to feed in the rich, cool pastures, and bring forth their young in the synauthous tangles of the chaparral zone, retiring again before the snowstorms of winter, mostly to the southward and westward of the mountain. In like manner the wild sheep of the adjacent region seek the lofty inaccessible crags of the summit as the snow melts and are driven down to the lower spurs and ridges where there is but little snow to the north and east of Shasta. Bears too roam in this foodful wilderness, feeding on grass, clover, berries, nuts, ant eggs, fish, flesh or fowl, whatever comes in their way, with but little troublesome discrimination. Sugar and honey they seem to like best of all, and they seek far to find the sweets, but when hard-pushed by hunger they make out to gnaw a living from the bark of trees and rotten logs, and might almost live on clean lava alone. Notwithstanding the California bears have had as yet but little experience with honeybees, they sometimes succeed in reaching the bountiful stores of these industrious gatherers and enjoy the feast with majestic relish. But most honeybees in search of a home are wise enough to make choice of a hollow in a living tree far from the ground, whenever such can be found. There they are pretty secure, for though the smaller brown and black bears climb well, they are unable to gnaw their way into strong hives, while compelled to exert themselves to keep from falling and at the same time endure the stings of the bees about the nose and eyes, without having their paws free to brush them off. But woe to the unfortunate who dwell in some prostrate trunk, and to the black bumblebees discovered in their mossy, mouse-like nests in the ground. With powerful teeth and claws, these are speedily laid bare, and almost before time is given for a general buzz, the bees, old and young, larvae, honey, stings, nest, and all are devoured in one ravishing revel. The antelope may still be found in considerable numbers to the northeastward of Shasta, but the elk once abundant have almost entirely gone from the region. The smaller animals such as the wolf, the various foxes, wild cats, coon, squirrels, and the curious wood rat that builds large brush-huts abound in all the wilder places, and the beaver, otter, mink, etc., may still be found along the sources of the rivers. The blue grouse and mountain quail are plentiful in the woods, and the sage hen on the plains about the northern base of the mountain, while innumerable smaller birds enliven and sweeten every thicket and grove. There are at least five classes of human inhabitants about the Shasta region. The Indians now scattered few in numbers and miserably demoralized, though still offering some rare specimens of savage manhood. Miners and prospectors found mostly to the north and west of the mountain, since the region about its base is overflowed with lava, cattle raisers mostly on the open plains to the northeastward and around the Klamath lakes, hunters and trappers where the woods and waters are wildest, and farmers in Shasta Valley on the north side of the mountain, wheat, apples, melons, berries, all the best production of farm and garden growing and ripening there at the foot of the Great White Cone, which seems at times during changing storms ready to fall upon them, the most sublime farm scenery imaginable. The Indians of the McLeod River that have come under my observation differ considerably in habits and features from the diggers and other tribes of the foothills and plains, and also from the Pautes and Modaks. They live chiefly on salmon. They seem to be closely related to the Tlingits of Alaska, Washington and Oregon, and may readily have found their way here by passing from stream to stream in which salmon abound. They have much better features than the Indians of the plains, and are rather wide awake, speculative and ambitious in their way, and guerrillas like the natives of the northern coast. Before the Modak War, they lived in dread of the Modaks, a tribe living about the Klamath Lake and the Lava Beds, who were in the habit of crossing the low Sierra Divide past the base of Shasta on free-booting excursions, stealing wives, fish and weapons from the pits and McLeods. Mothers would hush their children by telling them that the Modaks would catch them. During my stay at the government fish-hatching station on the McLeod, I was accompanied in my walks along the riverbank by a McLeod boy about ten years of age, a bright inquisitive fellow who gave me the Indian names of the birds and plants that we met. The water-ousle he knew well and he seemed to like the sweet singer, which he called Susini. He showed me how strips of the stems of the beautiful maiden-hair fern were used to adorn baskets with handsome brown bands, and pointed out several plants good to eat, particularly the large saxophrage growing abundantly along the river margin. Once I rushed suddenly upon him to see if he would be frightened, but he unflinchingly held his ground, struck a grand heroic attitude and shouted, Me no afraid, me Modak! Mount Shasta, so far as I have seen, has never been the home of Indians, not even their hunting ground to any great extent above the lower slopes of the base. They are said to be afraid of fire mountains and geyser basins as being the dwelling places of dangerously powerful and unmanageable gods. However it is food and their relations to other tribes that mainly control the movements of Indians, and here their food was mostly on the lower slopes, with nothing except the wild sheep to tempt them higher. Even these were brought within reach without excessive climbing during the storms of winter. On the north side of Shasta, near Sheep Rock, there is a long cavern sloping to the northward, nearly a mile in length, thirty or forty feet wide, and fifty feet or more in height, regular in form and direction like a railroad tunnel, and probably formed by the flowing away of a current of lava after the hardening of the surface. At the mouth of this cave, where the light and shelter is good, I found many of the heads and horns of the wild sheep and the remains of campfires, no doubt those of Indian hunters who in stormy weather had camped there and feasted after the fatigues of the chase. A wild picture that must have formed on a dark night, the glow of the fire, the circle of crouching savages around it, seen through the smoke, the dead game and the weird darkness and half darkness of the walls of the cavern, a picture of cave dwellers at home in the Stone Age. Interest in hunting is almost universal, so deeply is it rooted as an inherited instinct ever ready to rise and make itself known. Fine scenery may not stir a fiber of mind or body, but how quick and how true is the excitement of the pursuit of game. Then up flames the slumbering volcano of ancient wildness. All that has been done by church and school through centuries of cultivation is for the moment destroyed, and the decent gentleman or devout saint becomes a howling, bloodthirsty, demented savage. It is not long since we were all cavemen and followed game for food as truly as wildcat or wolf, and the long repression of civilization seems to make the rebound to savage love of blood all the more violent. This frenzy fortunately does not last long in its most exaggerated form, and after a season of wildness, refined gentlemen from cities are not more cruel than hunters and trappers who kill for a living. Dwelling apart in the depths of the woods are the various kinds of mountaineers, hunters, prospectors and the like. Rare men, queer characters and well worth knowing. Their cabins are located with reference to game and the ledges to be examined, and are constructed almost as simply as those of the wood rats made of sticks laid across each other without compass or square. But they afford good shelter from storms, and so are square with the need of their builders. These men as a class are singularly fine in manners, though their faces may be scarred and rough like the bark of trees. On entering their cabins you will promptly be placed on your good behavior, and your wants being perceived with quick insight, complete hospitality will be offered for body and mind to the extent of the larder. These men know the mountains far and near, and their thousand voices like the leaves of a book. They can tell where the deer may be found at any time of year or day and what they are doing, and so of all the other furred and feathered people they meet in their walks. And they can send a thought to its mark as well as a bullet. The aims of such people are not always the highest, yet how brave and manly and clean are their lives compared with too many in crowded towns, mildewed and dwarfed in disease and crime. How fine a chance is here to begin life anew in the free mountains and skylands of Shasta, where it is so easy to live and to die. The future of the hunter is likely to be a good one. No abrupt change about it, only a passing from wilderness to wilderness, from one high place to another. Now that the railroad has been built up the Sacramento, everybody with money may go to Mount Shasta, the weak as well as the strong, fine-grained, succulent people whose legs have never ripened as well as sinewy mountaineers seasoned long in the weather. This surely is not the best way of going to the mountains, yet it is better than staying below. Many still small voices will not be heard in the noisy rush and din, suggestive of going to the sky in a chariot of fire or a whirlwind, as one is shot to the Shasta mark in a booming palace car cartridge. Up the rocky canyon, skimmering the foaming river, above the level reaches, above the dashing spray, fine exhilarating translation, yet a pity to go so fast in a blur where so much might be seen and enjoyed. The mountains are fountains, not only a river's infertile soil, but of men. Therefore we are all in some sense mountaineers and going to the mountains is going home. Yet how many are doomed to toil in town shadows, while the white mountains beckon all along the horizon. Up the canyon to Shasta would be a cure for all care. But many on arrival seem at a loss to know what to do with themselves and seek shelter in the hotel, as if that were the Shasta they had come for. Others never leave the rail, content with the window views, and cling to the comforts of the sleeping car like blind mice to their mothers. Many are sick and have been dragged to the healing wilderness unwillingly for body good alone. Were the parts of the human machine detachable like Yankee inventions, how strange would be the gatherings on the mountains of pieces of people out of repair. How sadly unlike the wholehearted ongoing of the seeker after gold is this partial compulsory mountaineering, as if the mountain treasuries contain nothing better than gold. Up the mountains they go, high healed and high-hatted, laden like Christian with mortifications and mortgages of diverse sorts and degrees, some suffering from the sting of bad bargains, others exalting in good ones, hunters and fishermen with gun and rod and leggings, blithe and jolly troubadours to whom all Shasta is romance, poets singing their prayers, the weak and the strong, unable or unwilling to bear mental taxation. But whatever the motive, all will be in some measure benefited. None may wholly escape the good of nature, however imperfectly exposed to her blessings. The minister will not preach a perfectly flat and sedimentary sermon after climbing a snowy peak, and the fair play and tremendous impartiality of nature, so tellingly displayed, will surely affect the after-pleadings of the lawyer. Fresh air at least will get into everybody, and the cares of mere business will be quenched like the fires of a sinking ship. Possibly a branch railroad may sometime be built to the summit of Mount Shasta, like the road on Mount Washington. In the meantime tourists are dropped at Sissons, about 12 miles from the summit. Wents as headquarters they radiate in every direction to the so-called points of interest, sauntering about the flowery fringes of the strawberry meadows, bathing in the balm of the woods, scrambling, fishing, hunting, riding about Castle Lake, the McLeod River, soda springs, big spring, deer pastures, and elsewhere. Some demand bears and make excited inquiries concerning their haunts, how many there might be altogether on the mountain, and whether they are grisly, brown, or black. Others shout Excelsior and make off at once for the upper snow fields. Most, however, are content with comparatively level ground and moderate distances, gathering at the hotel every evening laden with trophies, great sheaves of flowers, cones of various trees, cedar and fir branches, covered with yellow lichens, and possibly a fish or two, or quail or grouse. But the heads of deer, antelope, wild sheep, and bears are conspicuously rare or altogether wanting in tourist collections in the Paradise of Hunters. There is a grand comparing of notes and adventures. Most are exhilarated and happy, though complaints may occasionally be heard. The mountain does not look so very high after all, nor so very white. The snow is in patches like rags spread out to dry, reminding one of Sidney Smith's joke against Jeffrey, damn the solar system, bad light, planets too indistinct. But far the greater number are in good spirits, showing the influence of holiday enjoyment and mountain air. Fresh roses come to cheeks that long have been pale, and sentiment often begins to blossom under the new inspiration. The Shasta region may be reserved as a national park, with special reference to the preservation of its fine forests and game. This should by all means be done. But as far as game is concerned, it is in little danger from tourists, notwithstanding many of them carry guns, and are in some sense hunters. Going in noisy groups and with guns so shining they are oftentimes confronted by inquisitive Douglas squirrels and are thus given opportunities for shooting, but the larger animals retire at their approach and seldom are seen. Other gun people, too wise or too lifeless to make much noise, move slowly along the trails and about the open spots of the woods, like benumbed beetles in a snowdrift. Such hunters are themselves hunted by the animals, which in perfect safety follow them out of curiosity. During the bright days of mid-summer, the ascent of Shasta is only a long, safe saunter, without fright or nerve strain, or even serious fatigue to those in sound health. Setting out from Sissons on horseback, accompanied by a guide leading a pack animal with provision, blankets, and other necessities, you follow a trail that leads up to the edge of the Timberline, where you camp for the night, eight or ten miles from the hotel, at an elevation of about ten thousand feet. The next day, rising early, you may push onto the summit and return to Sissons, but it is better to spend more time in the enjoyment of the grand scenery on the summit and about the head of the Whitney Glacier, pass the second night in camp, and return to Sissons on the third day. Passing around the margin of the meadows and on through the zones of the forest, you will have good opportunities to get ever-changing views of the mountain and its wealth of creatures that bloom and breathe. The woods differ but little from those that clothe the mountains to the southward, the trees being slightly closer together, and generally not quite so large, marking the incipient change from the open sunny forests of the Sierra, to the dense damp forests of the northern coast, where a squirrel may travel in the branches of the thick-set trees hundreds of miles without touching the ground. Around the upper belt of the forest, you may see gaps where the ground has been cleared by avalanches of snow. Thousands of tons in weight, which descending with ground rush and roar, brush the trees from their paths like so many fragile shrubs or grasses. At first the ascent is very gradual. The mountain begins to leave the plain and slopes scarcely perceptible, measuring from two to three degrees. These are continued by easy gradations mile after mile all the way to the truncated crumbling summit, where they attain a steepness of 20 to 25 degrees. The grand simplicity of these lines is partially interrupted on the north subordinate cone that rises from the side of the main cone about 3,000 feet from the summit. This side cone, past which your way to the summit lies, was active after the breaking up of the main icecap of the glacial period, as shown by the comparatively unwasted crater in which it terminates and by streams of fresh-looking, unglaciated lava that radiate from it as a center. The main summit is about a mile and a half in diameter from southwest to northeast and is nearly covered with snow and neve, bounded by crumbling peaks and ridges, among which we look in vain for any sure plan of an ancient crater. The extreme summit is situated on the southern end of a narrow ridge that bounds the general summit on the east. Viewed from the north, it appears as an irregular blunt point about 10 feet high and as fast as appearing before the stormy atmospheric action to which it is subjected. At the base of the eastern ridge, just below the extreme summit, hot sulfurous gases and vapor escape with a hissing, bubbling noise from a fissure in the lava. Some of the many small vents cast up a spray of clear hot water which falls back repeatedly until wasted in vapor. The steam and spray seem to be produced simply by melting snow coming in the way of the escaping gases, while the gases are evidently derived from the heated interior of the mountain and may be regarded as the last feeble expression of the mighty power that lifted the entire mass of the mountain from the volcanic depths far below the surface of the plain. The view from the summit in clear weather extends to an immense distance in every direction. Southeastward, the low volcanic portion of this Sierra is seen like a map, both flanks as well as the crater-dotted axis, as far as Lassen's Butte, a prominent landmark and an old volcano like Shasta, between 10 and 11,000 feet high and distant about 60 miles. Some of the higher summit peaks near Independence Lake, 180 miles away, are at times distinctly visible. Far to the north in Oregon, the snowy volcanic cones of Mount's Pit, Jefferson, and the Three Sisters rise in clear relief, like majestic monuments above the dim, dark sea of the northern woods. To the northeast lie the Rhett and Klamath Lakes, the lava beds, and a grand display of hill and mountain and gray rocky plains. The Scott, Siskiyou, and Trinity Mountains rise in long compact waves to the west and southwest, and the valley of the Sacramento and the coast mountains, with their marvelous wealth of woods and waters are seen. While close around the base of the mountain lies the beautiful Shasta Valley, Strawberry Valley, Huckleberry Valley, and many others, with the headwaters of the Shasta, Sacramento, and McLeod rivers. Some observers claim to have seen the ocean from the summit of Shasta, but I have not yet been so fortunate. The cinder cone near Lassen's Butte is remarkable as being the scene of the most recent volcanic eruption in the range. It is a symmetrical, truncated cone, covered with gray cinders and ashes, with a regular crater in which a few pines and inch or two in diameter are growing. It stands between two small lakes, which previous to the last eruption when the cone was built, formed one lake. From near the base of the cone, a flood of extremely rough black vesicular lava extends across what was once a portion of the bottom of the lake into the forest of Yellow Pine. This lava flow seems to have been poured out during the same eruption that gave birth to the cone, cutting the lake in two, flowing a little way into the woods and overwhelming the trees in its way, the ends of some of the charred trunks still being visible, projecting from beneath the advanced snout of the flow where it came to rest. While the floor of the forest for miles around is so thickly strewn with loose cinders that walking is very fatiguing, the Pitt River Indians tell of a fearful time of darkness, probably due to this eruption, when the sky was filled with falling cinders, which as they thought threatened every living creature with destruction, and say that when at length the sun appeared through the gloom it was red like blood. Less recent craters in great numbers dot the adjacent region, some with lakes in their throats, some overgrown with trees, others nearly bare, telling monuments of nature's mountain fires so often lighted throughout the northern Sierra, and standing on the top of Icy Shasta, the mightiest fire monument of them all, we can hardly fail to look forward to the glare and glare of its next eruption and wonder whether it is nigh. Elsewhere men have planted gardens and vineyards in the craters of volcanoes quiescent for ages, and almost without warning have been hurled into the sky. More than a thousand years of profound calm have been known to intervene between two violent eruptions, seventeen centuries intervened between two consecutive eruptions on the island of Ixia. Few volcanoes continue permanently in eruption. Like gigantic geysers spouting hot stone instead of hot water, they work and sleep, and we have no sure means of knowing whether they are only sleeping or dead.