Читать книгу The Book of the National Parks - Robert Sterling Yard - Страница 33

Any description of the glories of the John Muir Trail from its entrance into the park to its climax upon the summit of Mount Whitney far passes the limits of a chapter. In time it will inspire a literature.

Approaching from Yosemite through the canyon of the San Joaquin, the traveller swings around the north side of Mount Goddard, crosses gorgeous Muir Pass, and enters the fringe of cirques and lakes which borders the western edge of Sierra's crest from end to end. Through this he winds his way southward, skirting lakes, crossing snow-fields, encircling templed cirques, plunging into canyons, climbing divides, rounding gigantic peaks, surprising views of sublimity, mounting ever higher until he stands upon the shoulders of Mount Whitney. Dismounting here, he scrambles up the few hundred feet of stiff climb which places him on the summit, from which he looks out north, west, and south over the most diversified high mountain landscape in America, and eastward over the Sierra foothills to Death Valley, lowest land in the United States.

No thrilling Alpine feat is the ascent of our loftiest summit. But those who want to measure human strength and skill in terms of perpendicular granite may find among Whitney's neighbors peaks which will present harder problems than those offered abroad, peaks which themselves well may become as celebrated in future years.

The John Muir Trail is destined to a fame and a use perhaps many times as great as those men thought who conceived it as a memorial to a lover of the trail, and of all that that implies. It will play a distinguished part in the education of the nation in the love of mountains. It will win artists to a phase of the sublime in America which they have overlooked. It will bring students to the classrooms where Nature displays her most tremendous exhibits.

Nevertheless, Roosevelt's lower levels will draw many times as many devotees as will the High Sierra; and these visitors will stay longer. It is the valleys and the canyons which will prove the greatest lure, for here one may camp leisurely and in entire comfort, and thence make what trips he chooses into the regions of the peaks and the cirques.

There are literally thousands of canyons and of many kinds. Besides the Kern Canyon there are two which must rank with Yosemite. In the summer of 1916 I travelled the length of the park, as far as the Giant Forest, with a party led by Director Stephen T. Mather, of the National Park Service, then Assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, and was powerfully impressed with the scenic qualities of the Tehipite Valley, and the Kings River Canyon, at that time little known.

Time will not dim my memory of Tehipite Dome, the august valley and the leaping, singing river which it overlooks. Well short of the Yosemite Valley in the kind of beauty that plunges the observer into silence, the Tehipite Valley far excels it in bigness, power, and majesty. Lookout Point on the north rim, a couple of miles south of the Dome, gave us our first sensation. Three thousand feet above the river, it offered by far the grandest valley view I have looked upon, for the rim view into Yosemite by comparison is not so grand as it is beautiful.

The canyon revealed itself to the east as far as Mount Woodworth, its lofty diversified walls lifting precipitously from the heavy forests of the floor and sides, and yielding to still greater heights above. Enormous cliffs abutted, Yosemite-like, at intervals. South of us, directly across the canyon, rose the strenuous heights of the Monarch Divide, Mount Harrington, towering a thousand feet higher above the valley floor than Clouds Rest above the Yosemite. Down the slopes of the Monarch Divide, seemingly from its turreted summits, cascaded many frothing streams. The Eagle Peaks, Blue Canyon Falls, Silver Spur, the Gorge of Despair, Lost Canyon—these were some of the romantic and appropriate titles we found on the Geological Survey map.

And, close at hand, opposite Mount Harrington and just across Crown Creek Canyon, rose mighty Tehipite. We stood level with its rounded glistening dome. The Tehipite Dome is a true Yosemite feature. It compares in height and prominence with El Capitan. In fact, it stands higher above the valley floor and occupies a similar position at the valley's western gate. It is not so massive as El Capitan, and therefore not so impressive; but it is superb. It is better compared with Half Dome, though again perhaps not so impressive. But it has its own august personality, as notably so as either of these world-famed rocks; and, if it stood in the Yosemite, would share with them the incomparable valley's highest honors.

Descending to the floor, the whole aspect of the valley changed. Looking up, Tehipite Dome, now outlined against the sky, and the neighboring abrupt castellated walls, towered more hugely than ever. We did not need the contour map to know that some of these heights exceeded Yosemite's. The sky-line was fantastically carved into spires and domes, a counterpart in gigantic miniature of the Great Sierra of which it was the valley climax. The Yosemite measure of sublimity, perhaps, lacked, but in its place was a more rugged grandeur, a certain suggestion of vastness and power that I have not seen elsewhere.

This impression was strengthened by the floor itself, which contains no suggestion whatever of Yosemite's exquisiteness. Instead, it offers rugged spaciousness. In place of Yosemite's peaceful woods and meadows, here were tangled giant-studded thickets and mountainous masses of enormous broken talus. Instead of the quiet winding Merced, here was a surging, smashing, frothing, cascading, roaring torrent, several times its volume, which filled the valley with its turbulence.