Part 11

About a week ago at daybreak I started up the mountain near Glacier Point to see Pohono in its upper woods and to study the kind of life it lived up there. I had a glorious day and reached my cabin at daylight by walking all night. Oh, what a night among those moon shadows! It was seven o’clock A.M., when I reached the top of the Cathedral Rocks,--a most glorious twenty-two hours of life amid nameless peaks and meadows and the upper cataracts of Pohono.

Mr. Hutchings told me next morning that I had done two or three days’ climbing in one and that I was shortening my life, but I had a whole lifetime of enjoyment and I care but little for the arithmetical length of days. I can hardly realize that I have not yet seen you here.

I thank you for sending me so many friends, but I am waiting for you. I am going up the mountain soon to see your lily garden at the top of Indian Cañon.

“Let the Pacific islands lie.”

My love to Allie and all your boys and to the Doctor. Tell him that I have been tracing glaciers in all the principal cañons towards the summit.

Ever thine, J. MUIR.

Yosemite, August 20th, [1870.]

I have just returned from a ten days’ ramble with Prof. Le Conte and his students in the beyond, and oh, we have had a most glorious season of terrestrial grace. I do wish I could ramble ten days of equal size in very heaven, that I could compare its scenery with that of Bloody Cañon and the Tuolumne meadows and Lake Tenaya and Mt. Dana. Our first camp after leaving the valley was at Eagle Point, overlooking the valley on the north side, from which a much better general view of the valley and the high crest of the Sierra beyond is obtained than from Inspiration Point. There we watched the long shadows of sunset upon the living map at our feet, and, in the later darkness half silvered by the moon, went far out of human cares and human civilization. Our next camp was at Lake Tenaya, one of the countless multitudes of starry gems that make this topmost mountain land to sparkle like a sky. After moonrise Le Conte and I walked to the lake-shore and climbed upon a big sofa-shaped rock that stood islet-like a little way out in the shallow water, and here we found another bounteous throne of earthly grace, and I doubt if John in Patmos saw grander visions than we. And you were remembered there and we cordially wished you with us. Our next sweet home was upon the velvet gentian meadows of the South Tuolumne. Here we feasted upon soda and burnt ashy cakes and stood an hour in a frigid rain with our limbs bent forward like Lombardy poplars in a gale, but ere sunset the black clouds departed, our shins were straightened at a glowing fire, we forgot the cold and all about half-raw mutton and alkaline cakes, the grossest of our earthly coils was shaken off, and ere the last slant sunbeams left the dripping meadow and spiry mountain peaks we were again in the third alpine heaven and saw and heard things equal in glory to the purest and best of Yosemite itself. Our next camp was beneath a big gray rock at the foot of Mt. Dana. Here we had another rainstorm, which drove us beneath our rock, where we lay in complicated confusion, our forty limbs woven into a knotty piece of tissue compact as felt.

Next day we worshiped upon high places on the brown cone of Dana and returned to our rock. Next day walked among the flowers and cascades of Bloody Cañon and camped at the lake. Rode next day to the volcanic cone nearest to the lake, and bade farewell to the party and climbed to the highest crater in the whole range south of the Mono Lake. Well, I shall not try to tell you anything, as it is unnecessary. Prof. Le Conte, whose company I enjoyed exceedingly, will tell you all. Ask him in particular to tell you about our camp-meeting on the Tenaya rock. I will send you a few choice mountain plant children by Mrs. Yelverton. If there is anything in particular that you want, let me know. Mrs. Yelverton will not leave the valley for some weeks, and you have time to write. I am

Ever your friend, J. MUIR.

Tuolumne River, two miles below La Grange, November 4th, 1870.

Yours of October 2nd reached me a few days since. The Amazon and Andes have been in all my thoughts for many years, and I am sure that I shall meet them some day ere I die, or become settled and civilized and useful. I am obliged to you for all this information. I have studied many paths and plans for the interior of South America, but none so easy and sure ever appeared as this of your letter. I thought of landing at Guayaquil and crossing the mountains to the Amazon, floating to Para, subsisting on berries and quinine, but to steam along the palmy shores with company and comforts is perhaps more practical though not so pleasant. Hawthorne says that steam spiritualizes travel, but I think that it squarely degrades and materializes travel. However, flies and fevers have to be considered in this case. I am glad that Ned has gone. The woods of the Purús will be a grand place for the growth of men. It must be that I am going soon, for you have shown me the way. People say that my wanderings are very mazy and methodless, but they are all known to you in some way before I think of them. You are a prophet in the concerns of my little outside life, and pray, what says the spirit about my final escape from Yosemite? You saw me at these rock altars years ago, and I think I shall remain among them until you take me away. I reached this place last month by following the Merced out of the valley and through all its cañons to the plains above Snelling,--a most glorious walk.

I intended returning to the valley ere this, but Mr. Delaney, the man with whom I am stopping at present, would not allow me to leave before I had plowed his field, and so I will not be likely to see Yosemite again before January, when I shall have a grand journey over the snow.

Mrs. Yelverton told me before I started upon my river explorations that she would likely be in Oakland in two weeks, and so I made up a package for you of lily bulbs, cones, ferns, etc., but she wrote me a few days ago that she was still in the valley.

I find that a portion of my specimens collected in the last two years and left at this place and Hopeton are not very well cared for, and I have concluded to send them to you.

I will ship them in a few days by express, and I will be down myself perhaps in about a year. If there is anything in these specimens that the Doctor can make use of in his lectures, tell him to do so freely, of course.

The purple of these plains and of this whole round sky is very impressively glorious after a year in the deep rocks. People all throughout this section are beginning to hear of Dr. Carr. He accomplishes a wonderful amount of work.

My love to Allie and to the Doctor, and I am ever most

Cordially yours, JOHN MUIR.

Address to Snelling for the next few months.

Yosemite, [1871.]

“The Spirit” has again led me into the wilderness, in opposition to all counter attractions, and I am once more in the glory of the Yosemite.

Your very cordial invitation to your home reached me as I was preparing to ascend and my whole being was possessed with visions of snowy forests of the pine and spruce, and of mountain spires beyond, pearly and half transparent, reaching into heavens blue not purer than themselves.

In company with another young fellow whom I persuaded to walk, I left the plains just as the first gold sheets were being outspread. My first plan was to follow the Tuolumne upward as I had followed the Merced downward, and, after reaching the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which has about the same altitude as Yosemite, and spending a week or so in sketching and examining its falls and rocks, to cross the high mountains past the west end of the Hoffman Range and go down into Yosemite by Indian Cañon, passing thus a glorious month with the mountains and all their snows and crystal brightness, and all the nameless glories of their magnificent winter; but my plan went agley. I lost a week’s sleep by the pain of a sore hand, and I became unconfident in my strength when measured against weeks of wading in snow up to my neck. Therefore I reluctantly concluded to push directly for the valley and Tamarac.

Our journey was just a week in length, including one day of rest in the Crane’s Flat Cabin. Some of our nights were cold, and we were hungry once or twice. We crossed the snow-line on the flank of Pilot Peak Ridge six or eight miles below Crane’s Flat. From Crane’s Flat to brim of the valley the snow was about five feet in depth, and as it was not frozen or compacted in any way we of course had a splendid season of wading.

I wish that you could have seen the edge of the snow-cloud which hovered, oh, so soothingly, down to the grand Pilot Peak brows, discharging its heaven-begotten snows with such unmistakable gentleness and moving perhaps with conscious love from pine to pine as if bestowing separate and independent blessings upon each. In a few hours we climbed under and into this glorious storm-cloud. What a harvest of crystal flowers and what wind songs were gathered from the spiry firs and the long fringy arms of the Lambert pine! We could not see far before us in the storm, which lasted until some time in the night, but as I was familiar with the general map of the mountain we had no difficulty in finding our way.

Crane’s Flat Cabin was buried, and we had to grope about for the door. After making a fire with some cedar rails, I went out to watch the coming-on of the darkness, which was most impressively sublime. Next morning was every way the purest creation I ever beheld. The little flat, spot-like in the massive spiring woods, was in splendid vesture of universal white, upon which the grand forest-edge was minutely repeated and covered with a close sheet of snow flowers.

Some mosses grow luxuriantly upon the dead generations of their own species. The common snow flowers belong to the sky and in storms are blown about like ripe petals in an orchard. They settle on the ground, the bottom of the atmospheric sea, like mud or leaves in a lake, and upon this soil, this field of broken sky flowers, grows a luxuriant carpet of crystal vegetation complete and ripe in a single night.