From Year To Year In The Kindly Weather The Beds Are
Thus Gathering Beauty - Beauty For Ashes.
Returning to Sheep Rock and following the old emigrant road, one is
soon back again beneath the snows and shadows of Shasta, and the Ash
Creek and McCloud Glaciers come into view on the east side of the
mountain.
They are broad, rugged, crevassed cloudlike masses of down-grinding ice, pouring forth streams of muddy water as measures of the
work they are doing in sculpturing the rocks beneath them; very unlike
the long, majestic glaciers of Alaska that riverlike go winding down
the valleys through the forests to the sea. These, with a few others
as yet nameless, are lingering remnants of once great glaciers that
occupied the canyons now taken by the rivers, and in a few centuries
will, under present conditions, vanish altogether.
The rivers of the granite south half of the Sierra are outspread on
the peaks in a shining network of small branches, that divide again
and again into small dribbling, purling, oozing threads drawing their
sources from the snow and ice of the surface. They seldom sink out of
sight, save here and there in the moraines or glaciers, or, early in
the season, beneath the banks and bridges of snow, soon to issue
again. But in the north half, laden with rent and porous lava, small
tributary streams are rare, and the rivers, flowing for a time beneath
the sky of rock, at length burst forth into the light in generous
volume from seams and caverns, filtered, cool, and sparkling, as if
their bondage in darkness, safe from the vicissitudes of the weather
in their youth, were only a blessing.
Only a very small portion of the water derived from the melting ice
and snow of Shasta flows down its flanks on the surface. Probably
ninety-nine per cent of it is at once absorbed and drained away
beneath the porous lava-folds of the mountain to gush forth, filtered
and pure, in the form of immense springs, so large, some of them, that
they give birth to rivers that start on their journey beneath the sun,
full-grown and perfect without any childhood. Thus the Shasta River
issues from a large lake-like spring in Shasta Valley, and about two
thirds of the volume of the McCloud gushes forth in a grand spring on
the east side of the mountain, a few miles back from its immediate
base.
To find the big spring of the McCloud, or "Mud Glacier," which you
will know by its size (it being the largest on the east side), you
make your way through sunny, parklike woods of yellow pine, and a
shaggy growth of chaparral, and come in a few hours to the river
flowing in a gorge of moderate depth, cut abruptly down into the lava
plain. Should the volume of the stream where you strike it seem
small, then you will know that you are above the spring; if large,
nearly equal to its volume at its confluence with the Pitt River, then
you are below it; and in either case have only to follow the river up
or down until you come to it.
Under certain conditions you may hear the roar of the water rushing
from the rock at a distance of half a mile, or even more; or you may
not hear it until within a few rods. It comes in a grand, eager gush
from a horizontal seam in the face of the wall of the river gorge in
the form of a partially interrupted sheet nearly seventy-five yards in
width, and at a height above the riverbed of about forty feet, as
nearly as I could make out without the means of exact measurement.
For about fifty yards this flat current is in one unbroken sheet, and
flows in a lacework of plashing, upleaping spray over boulders that
are clad in green silky algae and water mosses to meet the smaller
part of the river, which takes its rise farther up. Joining the river
at right angles to its course, it at once swells its volume to three
times its size above the spring.
The vivid green of the boulders beneath the water is very striking,
and colors the entire stream with the exception of the portions broken
into foam. The color is chiefly due to a species of algae which seems
common in springs of this sort. That any kind of plant can hold on
and grow beneath the wear of so boisterous a current seems truly
wonderful, even after taking into consideration the freedom of the
water from cutting drift, and the constance of its volume and
temperature throughout the year. The temperature is about 45 degrees,
and the height of the river above the sea is here about three thousand
feet. Asplenium, epilobium, heuchera, hazel, dogwood, and alder make
a luxurious fringe and setting; and the forests of Douglas spruce
along the banks are the finest I have ever seen in the Sierra.
From the spring you may go with the river - a fine traveling companion - down to the sportsman's fishing station, where, if you are getting
hungry, you may replenish your stores; or, bearing off around the
mountain by Huckleberry Valley, complete your circuit without
interruption, emerging at length from beneath the outspread arms of
the sugar pine at Strawberry Valley, with all the new wealth and
health gathered in your walk; not tired in the least, and only eager
to repeat the round.
Tracing rivers to their fountains makes the most charming of travels.
As the life-blood of the landscapes, the best of the wilderness comes
to their banks, and not one dull passage is found in all their
eventful histories. Tracing the McCloud to its highest springs, and
over the divide to the fountains of Fall River, near Fort Crook,
thence down that river to its confluence with the Pitt, on from there
to the volcanic region about Lassen's Butte, through the Big Meadows
among the sources of the Feather River, and down through forests of
sugar pine to the fertile plains of Chico - this is a glorious saunter
and imposes no hardship.
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