The Book of the National Parks Part 14

Terrified, he threw back into the bowl behind him five strings of hiaqua to propitiate Tamanous, and there followed a momentary lull, during which he started homeward. But immediately the storm burst again with roarings like ten thousand bears.

Nothing could be done but to throw back more hiaqua. Following each sacrifice came another lull, followed in turn by more terrible outbreaks. And so, string by string, he parted with all his gains. Then he sank to the ground insensible.

When he awoke he lay under an arbutus-tree in a meadow of camas. He was shockingly stiff and every movement pained him. But he managed to gather and smoke some dry arbutus-leaves and eat a few camas-bulbs. He was astonished to find his hair very long and matted, and himself bent and feeble. "Tamanous," he muttered. Nevertheless, he was calm and happy.

Strangely, he did not regret his lost strings of hiaqua. Fear was gone and his heart was filled with love.

Slowly and painfully he made his way home. Everything was strangely altered. Ancient trees grew where shrubs had grown four days before.

Cedars under whose shade he used to sleep lay rotting on the ground.

Where his lodge had stood now he saw a new and handsome lodge, and presently out of it came a very old decrepit squaw who, nevertheless, through her wrinkles, had a look that seemed strangely familiar to him.

Her shoulders were hung thick with hiaqua strings. She bent over a pot of boiling salmon and crooned:

"My old man has gone, gone, gone.

My old man to Tacoma has gone.

To hunt the elk he went long ago.

When will he come down, down, down To salmon pot and me?"

"He has come down," quavered the returned traveller, at last recognizing his wife.

He asked no questions. Charging it all to the wrath of Tamanous, he accepted fate as he found it. After all, it was a happy fate enough in the end, for the old man became the Great Medicine-Man of his tribe, by whom he was greatly revered.

The name of this Rip Van Winkle of Mount Rainier is not mentioned in Mr.

Winthrop's narrative.

IX

CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO

CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK, SOUTHWESTERN OREGON. AREA, 249 SQUARE MILES

Crater Lake is in southwestern Oregon among the Cascade Mountains, and is reached by an automobile ride of several hours from Medford. The government information circular calls it "the deepest and bluest lake in the world." Advertising circulars praise it in choicest professional phrase. Its beauty is described as exceeding that of any other lake in all the world. Never was blue so wonderful as the blue of these waters; never were waters so deep as its two thousand feet.

Lured by this eloquence the traveller goes to Crater Lake and finds it all as promised--in fact, far better than promised, for the best intended adjectives, even when winged by the energetic pen of the most talented ad writer, cannot begin to convey the glowing, changing, mysterious loveliness of this lake of unbelievable beauty. In fact, the tourist, with expectation at fever-heat by the time he steps from the auto-stage upon the crater rim, is silenced as much by astonishment as by admiration.

Before him lies a crater of pale pearly lava several miles in diameter.

A thousand feet below its rim is a lake whose farthest blues vie in delicacy with the horizon lavas, and deepen as they approach till at his feet they turn to almost black. There is nothing with which to compare the near-by blue looked sharply down upon from Crater's rim. The deepest indigo is nearest its intensity, but at certain angles falls far short.

Nor is it only the color which affects him so strongly; its kind is something new, startling, and altogether lovely. Its surface, so magically framed and tinted, is broken by fleeting silver wind-streaks here and there; otherwise, it has the vast stillness which we a.s.sociate with the Grand Canyon and the sky at night. The lava walls are pearly, faintly blue afar off, graying and daubed with many colors nearer by.

Pinks, purples, brick-reds, sulphurs, orange-yellows and many intermediates streak and splash the foreground gray. And often pine-green forests fringe the rim, and funnel down sharply tilted canyons to the water's edge; and sometimes shrubs of livelier green find foothold on the gentler slopes, and, spreading, paint bright patches.

Over all, shutting down and around it like a giant bowl, is a sky of Californian blue overhead softening to the pearl of the horizon. A wonder spectacle indeed!

And then our tourist, recovering from his trance, walks upon the rim and descends the trail to the water's edge to join a launch-party around the lake. Here he finds a new and different experience which is quite as sensational as that of his original discovery. Seen close by from the lake's surface these tinted lava cliffs are carved as grotesquely as a j.a.panese ivory. Precipices rise at times two thousand feet, sheer as a wall. Elsewhere gentle slopes of powdery lava, moss-tinted, connect rim and water with a ruler line. And between these two extremes are found every fashion and kind and degree of lava wall, many of them precipitous, most of them rugged, all of them contorted and carved in the most fantastic manner that imagination can picture. Caves open their dark doors at water's edge. Towered rocks emerge from submerged reefs. A mimic volcano rises from the water near one side. Perpetual snow fills sheltered crevices in the southern rim.

And all this wonder is reflected, upside down, in the still mirror through which the launch ploughs its rapid way. But looking backward where the inverted picture is broken and tossed by the waves from the launch's prow, he looks upon a kaleidoscope of color which he will remember all his life; for, to the gorgeous disarray of the broken image of the cliffs is added the magic tint of this deep-dyed water, every wavelet of which, at its crest, seems touched for the fraction of a second with a flash of indigo; the whole dancing, sparkling, shimmering in a glory which words cannot convey; and on the other side, and far astern, the subsiding waves calming back to normal in a flare of robin's-egg blue.

Our tourist returns to the rim-side hotel to the ceremony of sunset on Crater Lake, for which the lake abandons all traditions and clothes itself in gold and crimson. And in the morning after looking, before sunrise, upon a Crater Lake of hard-polished steel from which a falling rock would surely bounce and bound away as if on ice, he breakfasts and leaves without another look lest repet.i.tion dull his priceless memory of an emotional experience which, all in all, can never come again the same.

It is as impossible to describe Crater Lake as it is to paint it. Its outlines may be photographed, but the photograph does not tell the story. Its colors may be reproduced, but the reproduction is not Crater Lake. More than any other spot I know, except the Grand Canyon from its rim, Crater Lake seems to convey a glory which is not of line or ma.s.s or color or composition, but which seems to be of the spirit. No doubt this vivid impression which the stilled observer seems to acquire with his mortal eye, is born somehow of his own emotion. Somehow he finds himself in communion with the Infinite. Perhaps it is this quality which seems so mysterious that made the Klamath Indians fear and shun Crater Lake, just as the Indians of the great plateau feared and shunned the Grand Canyon. It is this intangible, seemingly spiritual quality which makes the lake impossible either to paint or to describe.

So different is this spectacle from anything else upon the continent that the first question asked usually is how it came to be. The answer discloses one of the most dramatic incidents in the history of the earth.

In the evolution of the Cascades, many have been the misadventures of volcanoes. Some have been buried alive in ash and lava, and merged into conquering rivals. Some have been buried in ice which now, organized as glaciers, is wearing down their sides. Some have died of starvation and pa.s.sed into the hills. Some have been blown to atoms. Only one in America, so far as known, has returned into the seething gulf which gave it birth. That was Mount Mazama.

The processes of creation are too deliberate for human comprehension.

The Mississippi takes five thousand years to lower one inch its valley's surface. The making of Glacier National Park required many--perhaps hundreds--of millions of years. It seems probable that the cataclysm in which Mount Mazama disappeared was exceptional; death may have come suddenly, even as expressed in human terms.

What happened seems to have been this. Some foundation underpinning gave way in the molten gulf below, and the vast mountain sank and disappeared within itself. Imagine the spectacle who can! Mount Mazama left a clean-cut rim surrounding the hole through which it slipped and vanished. But there was a surging back. The eruptive forces, rebounding, pushed the shapeless ma.s.s again up the vast chimney. They found it too heavy a load. Deep within the ash-choked vent burst three small craters, and that was all. Two of these probably were short-lived, the third lasted a little longer. And, centuries later, spring water seeped through, creating Crater Lake.

Crater Lake is set in the summit of the Cascade Range, about sixty-five miles north of the California boundary. The road from the railway-station at Medford leads eighty miles eastward up the picturesque volcanic valley of the Rogue River. The country is magnificently forested. The mountains at this point are broad, gently rolling plateaus from which suddenly rise many volcanic cones, which, seen from elevated opens, are picturesque in the extreme. Each of these cones is the top of a volcano from whose summit has streamed the prehistoric floods of lava which have filled the intervening valleys, raising and levelling the country.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CROSS-SECTION OF CRATER LAKE SHOWING PROBABLE OUTLINE OF MOUNT MAZAMA]

Entering the park, a high, broad, forested elevation is quickly encountered which looks at a glance exactly what it is, the base which once supported a towering cone. At its summit, this swelling base is found to be the outside supporting wall of a roughly circular lake, about five miles in diameter, the inside wall of which is steeply inclined to the water's surface a thousand feet below. The strong contrast between the outer and inner walls tells a plainly read story.

The outer walls, all around, slope gently upward at an angle of about fifteen degrees; naturally, if carried on, they would converge in a peaked summit higher than that of Shasta. The inner walls converge downward at a steep angle, suggesting a funnel of enormous depth. It was through this funnel that Mount Mazama, as men call the volcano that man never saw, once collapsed into the gulf from which it had emerged.

Studying the scene from the Lodge on the rim where the automobile-stage has left you, the most vivid impressions of detail are those of the conformation of the inner rim, the cliffs which rise above it, and the small volcano which emerges from the blue waters of the lake.

The marvellous inner slope of the rim is not a continuous cliff, but a highly diversified succession of strata. Examination shows the layers of volcanic conglomerate and lava of which, like layers of brick and stone, the great structure was built. The downward dip of these strata away from the lake is everywhere discernible. The volcano's early story thus lies plain to eyes trained to read it. The most interesting of these strata is the lava flow which forms twelve thousand feet of the total precipice of Llao Rock, a prominence of conspicuous beauty.

Many of these cliffs are magnificently bold. The loftiest is Glacier Peak, which rises almost two thousand feet above the water's surface.

But Dutton Cliff is a close rival, and Vidae Cliff, Garfield Peak, Llao Rock, and the Watchman fall close behind. Offsetting these are breaks where the rim drops within six hundred feet of the water. The statement of a wall height of a thousand feet expresses the general impression, though as an average it is probably well short of the fact.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph copyright by Scenic America Company_

DUTTON CLIFF AND THE PHANTOM SHIP, CRATER LAKE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph copyright by Scenic America Company_

SUNSET FROM GARFIELD PEAK, CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK]

[Ill.u.s.tration: CROSS-SECTION OF CRATER LAKE]

At the foot of all the walls, at water's edge, lie slopes of talus, the rocky fragments which erosion has broken loose and dropped into the abyss. Nowhere is there a beach. The talus shallows the water for a few hundred feet, and descending streams build small deltas. These shallows edge the intense blue of the depths with exquisite lighter tints which tend to green. But this edging is very narrow.

The next most striking object after the gigantic carven cliffs is Wizard Island. This complete volcano in miniature, notwithstanding that it is forest-clothed and rises from water, carries the traveller's mind instantly to the thirteen similar cones which rise within the enormous desert crater of dead Haleakala, in the Hawaii National Park. Wizard Island's crater may easily be seen in the tip of its cone. Its two fellow volcanoes are invisible four hundred feet under water.

Scanning the blue surface, one's eye is caught by an interesting sail-like rock rising from the waters on the far right close to the foot of Dutton Cliff. This is the Phantom Ship. Seen two miles away in certain lights the illusion is excellent. The masts seem to tilt rakishly and the sails shine in the sun. There are times when the Phantom Ship suddenly disappears, and times again when it as suddenly appears where nothing was before. Hence its name and mysterious repute.

But there is nothing really mysterious about this ghostly behavior, which occurs only when the heated atmosphere lends itself readily to mirage.

Days and weeks of rare pleasure may be had in the exploration of these amazing walls, a pleasure greatly to be enhanced by discovering and studying the many plain evidences of Mazama's slow upbuilding and sudden extinction. The excellent automobile road around the rim affords easy approach afoot as well as by automobile and bicycle. Its pa.s.sage is enlivened by many inspiring views of the outlying Cascades with their great forests of yellow pine and their lesser volcanic cones, some of which, within and without the park boundaries, hung upon the flanks of Mount Mazama while it was belching flame and ash, while others, easing the checked pressure following the great catastrophe, were formed anew or enlarged from older vents.

From this road any part of the fantastic rim may be reached and explored, often to the water's edge, by adventurous climbers. What more enjoyable day's outing, for instance, than the exploration of the splendid pile of pentagonal basaltic columns suspended half-way in the rim at one point of picturesque beauty? What more inspiring than the climbing of Dutton Cliff, or, for experienced climbers, of many of the striking lava spires? The only drawback to these days of happy wandering along this sculptured and painted rim is the necessity of carrying drinking-water from the Lodge.

Then there are days of pleasure on the water. Wizard Island may be thoroughly explored, with luncheon under its trees by the lakeside. The Phantom Ship's gnarled lavas may be examined and climbed. Everywhere the steep rocky sh.o.r.e invites more intimate acquaintance; its caves may be entered, some afoot, at least one afloat. The lake is well stocked with rainbow trout, some of them descendants of the youngsters which Will G.

Steel laboriously carried across country from Gordon's Ranch, forty-nine miles away, in 1888. They are caught with the fly from sh.o.r.e and boat. A pound trout in Crater Lake is a small trout. Occasionally a monster of eight or ten pounds is carried up the trail to the Lodge.