Unexplored!. Chaffee Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ them, as it were, – where each day they would know when they started out just about where night would find them and what they would meet with on the way? Who wanted their views labeled anyway? That was all very well, very thoughtful of the Forest Service, for inexperienced campers, who would probably never venture into the unknown. But to Ace, the airman, to Ted, with his experienced wild-craft, and to Pedro the romanticist, no less than to the young Yale man whose thirst for far places had led him into the U. S. Geological Survey, the Mystery of the Unexplored called, with a lure that was not to be denied. Long Lester, they knew, was game for anything, – for had he not prospected through these mountains all his life? There was practically no place the sure-footed burros could not go, and there was no danger they were not secretly and wickedly tingling to encounter.

      It was a wild region, as rough and as little known as anything from Hawaii to Alaska, – only different. The John Muir Trail, named for the explorer, – a “way through” rather than a trail, – stretched along the crest of the range, the roughest kind of going, (absolutely a horse-back trip, it was generally pronounced), and from its glacier-capped peaks, from 14,500 foot Mt. Whitney, to the even more difficult though less lofty Lyell, ran the Kings’ River, North, Middle, and canyoned South Forks, the Kern and the Kaweah, the Merced and the San Joaquin, – to name only the largest.

      Unlike the older Eastern ranges, the Sierra is laid out with remarkable regularity, the one great 12,000- to 14,000-foot divide, with its scarcely lower passes, giving off ridges on the Western slope like the teeth of a coarse granite comb. Between ridges, deep, glacier-cut canyons, “yo-semities,” (to employ the Indian name), with their swift, cascading rivers make North to South travel difficult, though one can follow one side of the openly forested canyons to the very crest of the main ridge.

      Here and there was a grove of Big Trees, varying in size from the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park to the few mediocre specimens at Dinkey Creek. But as a rule the hot, irrigated valleys of the Sacramento and San Joaquin gave way to patches of the small oaks and pines of the foothills, and these in turn, several thousand feet higher up the Western slopes, to yellow pine and incense cedar, Sequoias and giant sugar pines. Higher still came the silver fir belt, and after that, the twisted Tamaracks and dwarfed and storm-tossed mountain pines, reaching often in at least a decorative fringe along the rock cracks to the very peaks, all the way up to 12,000 feet. (Tree line in the White Mountains of New Hampshire comes soon after 5,000.) Above that, of course, only snow and ice could clothe the slopes.

      Hell-for-Sure Pass was one name that attracted Ace’s eye on the map. He judged that it must mean stiff going, – but even had they actually planned to climb that way, he would have preferred to wait and discover for himself the reason for its nomenclature. There was also Deadman Pass, (another name to tickle the imagination), Electra Peak, Thousand Island Lake, The Devil’s Post Pile, Volcanic Ridge, Crater Creek, Stairway Creek, Fawn Meadow, – and dangerously near, Bear Meadow, – Vermilion Cliffs, Piute Pass, Disappearing Creek, Lost Canyon, Table Mountain, (reminiscent of the Bret Harte days), Deadman Canyon, (flavoring more strongly of the gold days of ’49), and Rattlesnake Creek, (doubtless deserving the title.) – To say nothing of such ordinary features as 13,500 foot University Peak, (a mere wave of the sea of peaks surrounding champions Lyell and Whitney), Diamond Peak, 13,000 feet, Mt. Baxter, likewise around 13,000, Mt. Pinchot, and a score of others (occurring at short intervals in a solid phalanx). Whoever wants to climb a mountain everybody climbs, seemed to be the final verdict of the party. There are other peaks almost as high as Whitney, (certainly quite high enough to suit the most fastidious sportsman), and probably even more difficult of ascent. Why not discover something new under the sun? In other words, why not strike off at random into the Unexplored? They would head right into the thick of the thickest green patch on the map, and wander as fancy dictated. If they felt like climbing, they would climb. If they felt like lazing, (as Pedro put it), they would laze. If they came to a river they could cross, all right. If they could not cross, why, all right, who cared?

      There was rumor of vast caves that riddled the back country. There were hot springs, soda springs, – who knew what? Good pasturage was never hard to find. The verdant meadows left by the glacier lakes could be counted on up to the very backs of the 9,000 foot ridges. Most of them were half to a mile wide, and at the head waters of the big rivers, they had heard, were meadows nearer ten miles in length.

      With one exception, every lake in the Sierras is a glacier lake (that exception being Huntington, a “made” lake four miles long that falls three thousand feet through a flume to add power to an electric plant). These lakes lie all the way up to as high as 8,000 feet above sea-level, Norris’s theory being that in time they will be found higher still. The glaciers left by the last ice age naturally melted first in the lower reaches, and as those that now cap the peaks and flow down between ridges like the arms of a starfish, melt in their turn, they will leave their icy, green-blue crystal pools higher and higher up the mountainsides. Just North of Mt. Ritter, Norris told them, lies a glacier lake at an altitude of 12,000 feet, while the glaciers still to be found are slowly, slowly grinding out the basins of the lakes that will one day, (possibly centuries hence), lie where now linger these evidences of the last glacier epoch.

      Where these lakes have in their turn disappeared they have left these rich-soiled meadows. Where these level-lying meadows failed them pasturage for their burros, Norris guaranteed that there would be plenty of hanging meadows, – long, narrow, bowldery strips of weed enameled verdure slanting up and down the moraine-covered canyon sides, beginning away up at timber line, where springs the source of their life-giving moisture.

      Before the group broke up that day, word came that Rosa’s brother had broken his leg, there at the fire outlook on Red Top. (A pack-mule had crowded his horse off the trail on the steep slope of an arroyo, and the horse had fallen, though breaking his otherwise sure descent into the creek below by coming sharply up against a tree trunk.)

      “The worst of it is,” worried Radcliffe, “with men so scarce, I don’t know who to send in his place. Besides, it’s a week’s horseback trip from here, – and fires breaking every day, – and he needs a doctor.”

      It was not till the deed was done that Ace returned to announce, with the smile of the cat who has licked the cream, that Rosa had insisted on taking her brother’s place. He, Ace, had found the spot from her sure knowledge of the topography of the place. (She had kept house there for her brother the summer before, in the wee, wind-swept cabin.) And leaving Rosa there, as she pluckily insisted, Ace brought her brother back, covering in minutes, as the bird flies, what it would have taken a week to traverse on horseback. Those mountain trails corkscrew up and down the canyon sides till instead of calling a certain distance a hundred miles according to the map, one states it, “a week into the back-country,” – or in the case of the trailless peaks, (among which Long Lester felt most at home), the same distance might be a matter of a four-weeks’ camping trip, with no human habitation, and the likelihood of not even a ranch at which to purchase supplies, in between.

      Then the Senator sent the ’plane back to San Francisco, and its hangar in Burlingame, before – as he said – his young hopeful could start anything more. He himself was to spend the next month fishing around Kings” River Canyon, putting up at the canvas hotel. But he took as much interest in the camping trip as if he had been a member of it, – as, indeed, did Ranger Radcliffe, though word of a fresh forest fire breaking cut short his part in the powwow.

      The question now arose, should they go horseback, or afoot with pack-burros, – a string of which Long Lester yearned to pilot.

      True, a mountain-bred pony will hop and slide up and down mountain ledges that would make an Eastern horse’s hair literally stand on end. They have been born and bred to it, physically and mentally. They have been known to sit back almost on their haunches and slide when they could get down no other way. Some of them will walk a log twenty feet above the surface of a stream. (The Eastern rider will find that hard to believe, until he recalls the feats of circus horses.) But not all horses are alike, any more than people. Why should the plains СКАЧАТЬ