THE MAIN CREST
The traveler in the High Sierras generally keeps to the west of the main crest.Sometimes he approaches fairly to the foot of the last slope;sometimes he angles away and away even down to what finally seems to him a lower country,--to the pine mountains of only five or six thousand feet.But always to the left or right of him, according to whether he travels south or north, runs the rampart of the system, sometimes glittering with snow, sometimes formidable and rugged with splinters and spires of granite.He crosses spurs and tributary ranges as high, as rugged, as snow-clad as these.They do not quite satisfy him.Over beyond he thinks he ought to see something great,--some wide outlook, some space bluer than his trail can offer him.One day or another he clamps his decision, and so turns aside for the simple and only purpose of standing on the top of the world.
We were bitten by that idea while crossing the Granite Basin.The latter is some ten thousand feet in the air, a cup of rock five or six miles across, surrounded by mountains much higher than itself.That would have been sufficient for most moods, but, resting on the edge of a pass ten thousand six hundred feet high, we concluded that we surely would have to look over into Nevada.
We got out the map.It became evident, after a little study, that by descending six thousand feet into a box canon, proceeding in it a few miles, and promptly climbing out again, by climbing steadily up the long narrow course of another box canon for about a day and a half's journey, and then climbing out of that to a high ridge country with little flat valleys, we would come to a wide lake in a meadow eleven thousand feet up.There we could camp.
The mountain opposite was thirteen thousand three hundred and twenty feet, so the climb from the lake became merely a matter of computation.This, we figured, would take us just a week, which may seem a considerable time to sacrifice to the gratification of a whim.But such a glorious whim!
We descended the great box canon, and scaled its upper end, following near the voices of a cascade.
Cliffs thousands of feet high hemmed us in.At the very top of them strange crags leaned out looking down on us in the abyss.From a projection a colossal sphinx gazed solemnly across at a dome as smooth and symmetrical as, but vastly larger than, St.Peter's at Rome.
The trail labored up to the brink of the cascade.
At once we entered a long narrow aisle between regular palisaded cliffs.
The formation was exceedingly regular.At the top the precipice fell sheer for a thousand feet or so;then the steep slant of the debris, like buttresses, down almost to the bed of the river.The lower parts of the buttresses were clothed with heavy chaparral, which, nearer moisture, developed into cottonwoods, alders, tangled vines, flowers, rank grasses.And away on the very edge of the cliffs, close under the sky, were pines, belittled by distance, solemn and aloof, like Indian warriors wrapped in their blankets watching from an eminence the passage of a hostile force.
We caught rainbow trout in the dashing white torrent of the river.We followed the trail through delicious thickets redolent with perfume; over the roughest granite slides, along still dark aisles of forest groves, between the clefts of boulders so monstrous as almost to seem an insult to the credulity.Among the chaparral, on the slope of the buttress across the river, we made out a bear feeding.Wes and I sat ten minutes waiting for him to show sufficiently for a chance.Then we took a shot at about four hundred yards, and hit him somewhere so he angled down the hill furiously.We left the Tenderfoot to watch that he did not come out of the big thicket of the river bottom where last we had seen him, while we scrambled upstream nearly a mile looking for a way across.Then we trailed him by the blood, each step one of suspense, until we fairly had to crawl in after him; and shot him five times more, three in the head, before he gave up not six feet from us; and shouted gloriously and skinned that bear.But the meat was badly bloodshot, for there were three bullets in the head, two in the chest and shoulders, one through the paunch, and one in the hind quarters.
Since we were much in want of meat, this grieved us.But that noon while we ate, the horses ran down toward us, and wheeled, as though in cavalry formation, looking toward the hill and snorting.So I put down my tin plate gently, and took up my rifle, and without rising shot that bear through the back of the neck.We took his skin, and also his hind quarters, and went on.
By the third day from Granite Basin we reached the end of the long narrow canon with the high cliffs and the dark pine-trees and the very blue sky.
Therefore we turned sharp to the left and climbed laboriously until we had come up into the land of big boulders, strange spare twisted little trees, and the singing of the great wind.
The country here was mainly of granite.It out-cropped in dikes, it slid down the slopes in aprons, it strewed the prospect in boulders and blocks, it seamed the hollows with knife-ridges.Soil gave the impression of having been laid on top; you divined the granite beneath it, and not so very far beneath it, either.A fine hair-grass grew close to this soil, as though to produce as many blades as possible in the limited area.
But strangest of all were the little thick twisted trees with the rich shaded umber color of their trunks.
They occurred rarely, but still in sufficient regularity to lend the impression of a scattered grove-cohesiveness.Their limbs were sturdy and reaching fantastically.On each trunk the colors ran in streaks, patches, and gradations from a sulphur yellow, through browns and red-orange, to a rich red-umber.
They were like the earth-dwarfs of German legend, come out to view the roof of their workshop in the interior of the hill; or, more subtly, like some of the more fantastic engravings of Gustave Dore.
