But Look Well To Your
Footing, For The Way Will Test The Skill Of The Most Cautious
Mountaineers.
Regaining the low ground at the base of the mountain and holding on in
your grand orbit, you pass through a belt of juniper woods, called
"The Cedars," to Sheep Rock at the foot of the Shasta Pass.
Here you
strike the old emigrant road, which leads over the low divide to the
eastern slopes of the mountain. In a north-northwesterly direction
from the foot of the pass you may chance to find Pluto's Cave, already
mentioned; but it is not easily found, since its several mouths are on
a level with the general surface of the ground, and have been made
simply by the falling-in of portions of the roof. Far the most
beautiful and richly furnished of the mountain caves of California
occur in a thick belt of metamorphic limestone that is pretty
generally developed along the western flank of the Sierra from the
McCloud River to the Kaweah, a distance of nearly four hundred miles.
These volcanic caves are not wanting in interest, and it is well to
light a pitch pine torch and take a walk in these dark ways of the
underworld whenever opportunity offers, if for no other reason to see
with new appreciation on returning to the sunshine the beauties that
lie so thick about us.
Sheep Rock is about twenty miles from Sisson's, and is one of the
principal winter pasture grounds of the wild sheep, from which it
takes its name.
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