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 blare 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 Ischia. 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.
IV
A Perilous Night on Shasta's Summit
Toward the end of summer, after a light, open winter, one may reach
the summit of Mount Shasta without passing over much snow, by keeping
on the crest of a long narrow ridge, mostly bare, that extends from
near the camp-ground at the timberline. But on my first excursion to
the summit the whole mountain, down to its low swelling base, was
smoothly laden with loose fresh snow, presenting a most glorious mass
of winter mountain scenery, in the midst of which I scrambled and
reveled or lay snugly snowbound, enjoying the fertile clouds and the
snow-bloom in all their growing, drifting grandeur.
I had walked from Redding, sauntering leisurely from station to
station along the old Oregon stage road, the better to see the rocks
and plants, birds and people, by the way, tracing the rushing
Sacramento to its fountains around icy Shasta. The first rains had
fallen on the lowlands, and the first snows on the mountains, and
everything was fresh and bracing, while an abundance of balmy sunshine
filled all the noonday hours. It was the calm afterglow that usually
succeeds the first storm of the winter. I met many of the birds that
had reared their young and spent their summer in the Shasta woods and
chaparral. They were then on their way south to their winter homes,
leading their young full-fledged and about as large and strong as the
parents. Squirrels, dry and elastic after the storms, were busy about
their stores of pine nuts, and the latest goldenrods were still in
bloom, though it was now past the middle of October. The grand color
glow - the autumnal jubilee of ripe leaves - was past prime, but,
freshened by the rain, was still making a fine show along the banks of
the river and in the ravines and the dells of the smaller streams.
At the salmon-hatching establishment on the McCloud River I halted a
week to examine the limestone belt, grandly developed there, to learn
what I could of the inhabitants of the river and its banks, and to
give time for the fresh snow that I knew had fallen on the mountain to
settle somewhat, with a view to making the ascent. A pedestrian on
these mountain roads, especially so late in the year, is sure to
excite curiosity, and many were the interrogations concerning my
ramble. When I said that I was simply taking a walk, and that icy
Shasta was my mark, I was invariably admonished that I had come on a
dangerous quest. The time was far too late, the snow was too loose
and deep to climb, and I should be lost in drifts and slides. When I
hinted that new snow was beautiful and storms not so bad as they were
called, my advisers shook their heads in token of superior knowledge
and declared the ascent of "Shasta Butte" through loose snow
impossible. Nevertheless, before noon of the second of November I was
in the frosty azure of the utmost summit.
When I arrived at Sisson's everything was quiet. The last of the
summer visitors had flitted long before, and the deer and bears also
were beginning to seek their winter homes. My barometer and the
sighing winds and filmy half-transparent clouds that dimmed the
sunshine gave notice of the approach of another storm, and I was in
haste to be off and get myself established somewhere in the midst of
it, whether the summit was to be attained or not. Sisson, who is a
mountaineer, speedily fitted my out for storm or calm as only a
mountaineer could, with warm blankets and a week's provisions so
generous in quantity and kind that they easily might have been made to
last a month in case of my being closely snowbound. Well I knew the
weariness of snow-climbing, and the frosts, and the dangers of
mountaineering so late in the year; therefore I could not ask a guide
to go with me, even had one been willing. All I wanted was to have
blankets and provisions deposited as far up in the timber as the snow
would permit a pack animal to go. There I could build a storm nest
and lie warm, and make raids up and around the mountain in accordance
with the weather.
Setting out on the afternoon of November first, with Jerome Fay,
mountaineer and guide, in charge of the animals, I was soon plodding
wearily upward through the muffled winter woods, the snow of course
growing steadily deeper and looser, so that we had to break a trail.
The animals began to get discouraged, and after night and darkness
came on they became entangled in a bed of rough lava, where, breaking
through four or five feet of mealy snow, their feet were caught
between angular boulders. Here they were in danger of being lost, but
after we had removed packs and saddles and assisted their efforts with
ropes, they all escaped to the side of a ridge about a thousand feet
below the timberline.
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