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
attractivehighway. 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
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 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
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; 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
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 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[4] 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
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
canyon is all
broadly open again--the floor luxuriantly
forested with pine, and
spruce, and silver fir, and brown-trunked
libocedrus. 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
glacierperiod 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 Lyell and
Dana, and all the mountains between, and from the nearer Cathedral
Peak, flowed
hither, welded into one, and worked together. After
eroding this Tanaya Lake basin, and all the
splendidly sculptured