



Produced by Dianne Bean.  HTML version by Al Haines.









THE MOUNTAINS


BY

STEWART EDWARD WHITE



AUTHOR OF

"THE BLAZED TRAIL," "SILENT PLACES," "THE FOREST," ETC.





PREFACE

The author has followed a true sequence of events practically in all
particulars save in respect to the character of the Tenderfoot.  He is
in one sense fictitious; in another sense real.  He is real in that he
is the apotheosis of many tenderfeet, and that everything he does in
this narrative he has done at one time or another in the author's
experience.  He is fictitious in the sense that he is in no way to be
identified with the third member of our party in the actual trip.



CONTENTS

     I.  THE RIDGE TRAIL
    II.  ON EQUIPMENT
   III.  ON HORSES
    IV.  HOW TO GO ABOUT IT
     V.  THE COAST RANGES
    VI.  THE INFERNO
   VII.  THE FOOT-HILLS
  VIII.  THE PINES
    IX.  THE TRAIL
     X.  ON SEEING DEER
    XI.  ON TENDERFEET
   XII.  THE CANON
  XIII.  TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS
   XIV.  ON CAMP COOKERY
    XV.  ON THE WIND AT NIGHT
   XVI.  THE VALLEY
  XVII.  THE MAIN CREST
 XVIII.  THE GIANT FOREST
   XIX.  ON COWBOYS
    XX.  THE GOLDEN TROUT
   XXI.  ON GOING OUT
  XXII.  THE LURE OF THE TRAIL




THE MOUNTAINS



I

THE RIDGE TRAIL

Six trails lead to the main ridge.  They are all good trails, so that
even the casual tourist in the little Spanish-American town on the
seacoast need have nothing to fear from the ascent.  In some spots they
contract to an arm's length of space, outside of which limit they drop
sheer away; elsewhere they stand up on end, zigzag in lacets each more
hair-raising than the last, or fill to demoralization with loose
boulders and shale.  A fall on the part of your horse would mean a more
than serious accident; but Western horses do not fall.  The major
premise stands: even the casual tourist has no real reason for fear,
however scared he may become.

Our favorite route to the main ridge was by a way called the Cold
Spring Trail.  We used to enjoy taking visitors up it, mainly because
you come on the top suddenly, without warning.  Then we collected
remarks.  Everybody, even the most stolid, said something.

You rode three miles on the flat, two in the leafy and gradually
ascending creek-bed of a canon, a half hour of laboring steepness in
the overarching mountain lilac and laurel.  There you came to a great
rock gateway which seemed the top of the world.  At the gateway was a
Bad Place where the ponies planted warily their little hoofs, and the
visitor played "eyes front," and besought that his mount should not
stumble.

Beyond the gateway a lush level canon into which you plunged as into a
bath; then again the laboring trail, up and always up toward the blue
California sky, out of the lilacs, and laurels, and redwood chaparral
into the manzanita, the Spanish bayonet, the creamy yucca, and the fine
angular shale of the upper regions.  Beyond the apparent summit you
found always other summits yet to be climbed.  And all at once, like
thrusting your shoulders out of a hatchway, you looked over the top.

Then came the remarks.  Some swore softly; some uttered appreciative
ejaculation; some shouted aloud; some gasped; one man uttered three
times the word "Oh,"--once breathlessly, Oh! once in awakening
appreciation, OH! once in wild enthusiasm, OH! Then invariably they
fell silent and looked.

For the ridge, ascending from seaward in a gradual coquetry of
foot-hills, broad low ranges, cross-systems, canons, little flats, and
gentle ravines, inland dropped off almost sheer to the river below.
And from under your very feet rose, range after range, tier after tier,
rank after rank, in increasing crescendo of wonderful tinted mountains
to the main crest of the Coast Ranges, the blue distance, the
mightiness of California's western systems.  The eye followed them up
and up, and farther and farther, with the accumulating emotion of a
wild rush on a toboggan.  There came a point where the fact grew to be
almost too big for the appreciation, just as beyond a certain point
speed seems to become unbearable.  It left you breathless,
wonder-stricken, awed.  You could do nothing but look, and look, and
look again, tongue-tied by the impossibility of doing justice to what
you felt.  And in the far distance, finally, your soul, grown big in a
moment, came to rest on the great precipices and pines of the greatest
mountains of all, close under the sky.

In a little, after the change had come to you, a change definite and
enduring, which left your inner processes forever different from what
they had been, you turned sharp to the west and rode five miles along
the knife-edge Ridge Trail to where Rattlesnake Canon led you down and
back to your accustomed environment.

To the left as you rode you saw, far on the horizon, rising to the
height of your eye, the mountains of the channel islands.  Then the
deep sapphire of the Pacific, fringed with the soft, unchanging white
of the surf and the yellow of the shore.  Then the town like a little
map, and the lush greens of the wide meadows, the fruit-groves, the
lesser ranges--all vivid, fertile, brilliant, and pulsating with
vitality. You filled your senses with it, steeped them in the beauty of
it.  And at once, by a mere turn of the eyes, from the almost crude
insistence of the bright primary color of life, you faced the tenuous
azures of distance, the delicate mauves and amethysts, the lilacs and
saffrons of the arid country.

This was the wonder we never tired of seeing for ourselves, of showing
to others.  And often, academically, perhaps a little wistfully, as one
talks of something to be dreamed of but never enjoyed, we spoke of how
fine it would be to ride down into that land of mystery and
enchantment, to penetrate one after another the canons dimly outlined
in the shadows cast by the westering sun, to cross the mountains lying
outspread in easy grasp of the eye, to gain the distant blue Ridge, and
see with our own eyes what lay beyond.

For to its other attractions the prospect added that of impossibility,
of unattainableness.  These rides of ours were day rides.  We had to
get home by nightfall. Our horses had to be fed, ourselves to be
housed. We had not time to continue on down the other side whither the
trail led.  At the very and literal brink of achievement we were forced
to turn back.

Gradually the idea possessed us.  We promised ourselves that some day
we would explore.  In our after-dinner smokes we spoke of it.
Occasionally, from some hunter or forest-ranger, we gained little items
of information, we learned the fascination of musical names--Mono
Canon, Patrera Don Victor, Lloma Paloma, Patrera Madulce, Cuyamas,
became familiar to us as syllables.  We desired mightily to body them
forth to ourselves as facts.  The extent of our mental vision expanded.
We heard of other mountains far beyond these farthest--mountains whose
almost unexplored vastnesses contained great forests, mighty valleys,
strong water-courses, beautiful hanging-meadows, deep canons of
granite, eternal snows,--mountains so extended, so wonderful, that
their secrets offered whole summers of solitary exploration.  We came
to feel their marvel, we came to respect the inferno of the Desert that
hemmed them in.  Shortly we graduated from the indefiniteness of
railroad maps to the intricacies of geological survey charts.  The
fever was on us.  We must go.

A dozen of us desired.  Three of us went; and of the manner of our
going, and what you must know who would do likewise, I shall try here
to tell.



II

ON EQUIPMENT

If you would travel far in the great mountains where the trails are few
and bad, you will need a certain unique experience and skill.  Before
you dare venture forth without a guide, you must be able to do a number
of things, and to do them well.

First and foremost of all, you must be possessed of that strange sixth
sense best described as the sense of direction.  By it you always know
about where you are.  It is to some degree a memory for back-tracks and
landmarks, but to a greater extent an instinct for the lay of the
country, for relative bearings, by which you are able to make your way
across-lots back to your starting-place.  It is not an uncommon
faculty, yet some lack it utterly.  If you are one of the latter class,
do not venture, for you will get lost as sure as shooting, and being
lost in the mountains is no joke.

Some men possess it; others do not.  The distinction seems to be almost
arbitrary.  It can be largely developed, but only in those with whom
original endowment of the faculty makes development possible. No matter
how long a direction-blind man frequents the wilderness, he is never
sure of himself. Nor is the lack any reflection on the intelligence.  I
once traveled in the Black Hills with a young fellow who himself
frankly confessed that after much experiment he had come to the
conclusion he could not "find himself."  He asked me to keep near him,
and this I did as well as I could; but even then, three times during
the course of ten days he lost himself completely in the tumultuous
upheavals and canons of that badly mixed region.  Another, an old
grouse-hunter, walked twice in a circle within the confines of a thick
swamp about two miles square. On the other hand, many exhibit almost
marvelous skill in striking a bee-line for their objective point, and
can always tell you, even after an engrossing and wandering hunt,
exactly where camp lies.  And I know nothing more discouraging than to
look up after a long hard day to find your landmarks changed in
appearance, your choice widened to at least five diverging and similar
canons, your pockets empty of food, and the chill mountain twilight
descending.

Analogous to this is the ability to follow a dim trail.  A trail in the
mountains often means merely a way through, a route picked out by some
prospector, and followed since at long intervals by chance travelers.

It may, moreover, mean the only way through. Missing it will bring you
to ever-narrowing ledges, until at last you end at a precipice, and
there is no room to turn your horses around for the return.  Some of
the great box canons thousands of feet deep are practicable by but one
passage,--and that steep and ingenious in its utilization of ledges,
crevices, little ravines, and "hog's-backs"; and when the only
indications to follow consist of the dim vestiges left by your last
predecessor, perhaps years before, the affair becomes one of
considerable skill and experience. You must be able to pick out
scratches made by shod hoofs on the granite, depressions almost filled
in by the subsequent fall of decayed vegetation, excoriations on fallen
trees.  You must have the sense to know AT ONCE when you have overrun
these indications, and the patience to turn back immediately to your
last certainty, there to pick up the next clue, even if it should take
you the rest of the day.  In short, it is absolutely necessary that you
be at least a persistent tracker.

Parenthetically; having found the trail, be charitable. Blaze it, if
there are trees; otherwise "monument" it by piling rocks on top of one
another.  Thus will those who come after bless your unknown shade.

Third, you must know horses.  I do not mean that you should be a
horse-show man, with a knowledge of points and pedigrees.  But you must
learn exactly what they can and cannot do in the matters