Part 21

The scenic detail of the volcanic landscape is interesting and different from any other. Centuries and the elements create from lava a soil of great fertility. No forests and wild flowers excel those growing on the lavas of the Cascades, and the fertility of the Hawaiian Islands, which are entirely volcanic, is world-famous. Streams cut deep and often highly colored canyons in these broad lava lands, and wind and rain, while eroding valleys, often leave ornately modelled edifices of harder rock, and tall thin needles pointing to the zenith.

In the near neighborhood of the volcanoes, as well as on their sloping sides, are found lava formations of many strange and wonderful kinds. Hot springs and bubbling paint pots abound; and in the Yellowstone National Park, geysers. Fields of fantastic, twisted shapes, masses suggesting heaps of tumbled ropes, upstanding spatter cones, caves arched with lava roofs, are a very few of the very many phenomena which the climber of a volcano encounters on his way. And at the top, broad, bowl-shaped craters, whose walls are sometimes many hundred feet deep, enclose, if the crater has long been dormant, sandy floors, from which, perhaps, small cinder cones arise. If the crater still is active, the adventurer's experiences are limited only by his daring.

The entire region, in short, strikingly differs from any other of scenic kind.

Of the several processes of world-making, all of which are progressing to-day at normal speed, none is so thrilling as volcanism, because no other concentrates action into terms of human grasp. Lassen Peak's eruption of a thousand cubic yards of lava in a few hours thrills us more than the Mississippi's erosion of an average foot of her vast valley in a hundred thousand years; yet the latter is enormously the greater. The explosion of Mount Katmai, the rise and fall of Kilauea's boiling lava, the playing of Yellowstone's monster geysers, the spectacle of Mazama's lake-filled crater, the steaming of the Cascade's myriad bubbling springs, all make strong appeal to the imagination. They carry home the realization of mysterious, overwhelming power.

Lava is molten rock of excessively high temperature, which suddenly becomes released from the fearful pressures of earth's interior. Hurled from volcanic vents, or gushing from cracks in the earth's skin, it spreads rapidly over large neighborhoods, filling valleys and raising bulky rounded masses.

Often it is soft and frothy, like pumice. Even in its frequent glass forms, obsidian, for example, it easily disintegrates. There are as many kinds of lava as there are kinds of rock from which it is formed.

Volcanic scenery is by no means confined to what we call the volcanic national parks. Volcanoes were frequent in many parts of the continent. We meet their remnants unexpectedly among the granites of the Rockies and the Sierra, and the sedimentary rocks of the west and the southwest. Several of our national parks besides those prevailingly volcanic, and several of our most distinguished national monuments, exhibit interesting volcanic interludes.

VII

LASSEN PEAK AND MOUNT KATMAI

THE ONE A NATIONAL PARK IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, THE OTHER A NATIONAL MONUMENT IN ALASKA

Because most of the conspicuous volcanic eruptions of our day have occurred in warmer climes nearer the equator, we usually think of volcanoes as tropical, or semi-tropical, phenomena. Vesuvius is in the Mediterranean, Pelee in the Caribbean, Mauna Loa and Kilauea on the Hawaiian Islands. Of course there is Lassen Peak in California--the exception, as we say, which proves the rule.

As a fact, many of the world's greatest volcanoes are very far indeed from the tropics. Volcanoes result from the movement of earth masses seeking equilibrium underneath earth's crust, but near enough to the surface to enable molten rock under terrific pressure to work upward from isolated pockets and break through. Volcanoes occur in all latitudes. Even Iceland has its great volcano. It is true that the volcano map shows them congregating thickly in a broad band, of which the equator is the centre, but it also shows them bordering the Pacific Coast from Patagonia to Alaska, crossing the ocean through the Aleutian Islands, and extending far down the Asian coast. It also shows many inland volcanoes, isolated and in series. The distribution is exceedingly wide.

Volcanoes usually occur in belts which may or may not coincide with lines of weakening in the earth's crust below. Hence the series of flaming torches of prehistoric days which, their fires now extinguished and their sides swathed in ice, have become in our day the row of spectacular peaks extending from northern California to Puget Sound. Hence also the long range of threatening summits which skirts Alaska's southern shore, to-day the world's most active volcanic belt. Here it was that Katmai's summit was lost in the mighty explosion of June, 1912, one of enormous violence, which followed tremendous eruptions elsewhere along the same coast, and is expected to be followed by others, perhaps of even greater immensity and power.

These two volcanic belts contain each an active volcano which Congress has made the centre of a national reservation. Lassen Peak, some wise men believe, is the last exhibit of activity in the dying volcanism of the Cascade Mountains. Mount Katmai is the latest and greatest exhibit in a volcanic belt which is believed to be young and growing.

THE BUILDING OF THE CASCADES

Millions of years ago, in the period which geologists call Tertiary, the pressure under that part of the crust of the earth which now is Washington, Oregon, and northern California, became too powerful for solid rock to withstand. Long lines of hills appeared parallel to the sea, and gradually rose hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of feet. These cracked, and from the long summit-fissures issued hot lava, which spread over enormous areas and, cooling, laid the foundations for the coming Cascade Mountains.

When the gaping fissures eased the pressure from beneath, they filled with ash and lava except at certain vent holes, around which grew the volcanoes which, when their usefulness as chimneys passed, became those cones of ice and snow which now are the glory of our northwest.

There may have been at one time many hundreds of these volcanoes, big and little. Most of them doubtless quickly perished under the growing slopes of their larger neighbors, and, as they became choked with ash, the lava which had been finding vent through them sought other doors of escape, and found them in the larger volcanoes. Thus, by natural selection, there survived at last that knightly company of monsters now uniformed in ice, which includes, from north to south, such celebrities as Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, Mount Hood, vanished Mount Mazama, Mount Shasta, and living Lassen Peak.

Whether or not several of these vast beacons lit Pacific's nights at one time can never be known with certainty, but probability makes the claim. Whether or not in their decline the canoes of prehistoric men found harbor by guidance of their pillars of fire by night, and their pillars of smoke by day is less probable but possible. One at least of the giant band, Lassen Peak, is semi-active to-day. At least two others, Mount Rainier and Mount Baker, offer evidences of internal heat beneath their mail of ice. And early settlers in the northwest report Indian traditions of the awful cataclysm in which Mount Rainier lost two thousand feet of cone.

LASSEN PEAK NATIONAL PARK

Lassen Peak, the last of the Cascades in active eruption, rises between the northern end of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, of which it is locally but wrongly considered a part, and the Klamath Mountains, a spur of the Cascades. Actually it is the southern terminus of the Cascades.

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Though quiet for more than two hundred years, the region long has enjoyed scientific and popular interest because it possesses hot springs, mud volcanoes and other minor volcanic phenomena, and particularly because its cones, which are easily climbed and studied, have remained very nearly perfect. Besides Lassen Peak, whose altitude is 10,437 feet, there are others of large size and great interest close by. Prospect Peak attains the altitude of 9,200 feet; Harkness Peak 9,000 feet; and Cinder Cone, a specimen of unusual beauty, 6,907 feet.

Because it seemed desirable to conserve the best two of these examples of recent volcanism, President Taft in 1906 created the Lassen Peak and the Cinder Cone National Monuments. Doubtless there would have been no change in the status of these reservations had not Lassen Peak broken its long sleep in the spring of 1914 with a series of eruptions covering a period of nineteen months. This centred attention upon the region, and in August, 1916, Congress created the Lassen Volcanic National Park, a reservation of a hundred and twenty-four square miles, which included both national monuments, other notable cones of the neighborhood, and practically all the hot springs and other lesser phenomena. Four months after the creation of the national park Lassen Peak ceased activity with its two hundred and twelfth eruption. It is not expected to resume. For some years, however, scientists will continue to class it as semi-active.

These eruptions, none of which produced any considerable lava flow, are regarded as probably the dying gasps of the volcanic energy of the Cascades. They began in May, 1914, with sharp explosions of steam and smoke from the summit crater. The news aroused wide-spread interest throughout the United States; it was the first volcanic eruption within the national boundaries. During the following summer there were thirty-eight slight similar eruptions, some of which scattered ashes in the neighborhood. The spectacle was one of magnificence because of the heavy columns of smoke. Eruptions increased in frequency with winter, fifty-six occurring during the balance of the year.

LASSEN PEAK SEEN FROM THE SOUTHWEST

On the left is the material last erupted from the slope of the peak. It is called Chaos]

LASSEN PEAK CLOSE UP