The Sierra Nevada Mountain Range - Part 2

For four hundred miles the Sierras are a definite ridge, broad and high, and having the form of a sea wave. Buttresses of dark-hued rock, jutting at intervals from a steep wall, form the abrupt eastern slopes; irregular forests, in scattered growth, huddle together near the snow. The lower slopes are barren spurs, sinking into the sterile flats of the Great Basin.

Long ridges of comparatively gentle outline characterize the western side, but this sloping table is scored from summit to base by a system of parallel transverse canyons, distant from one another often by less than twenty-five miles. They are ordinarily two or three thousand feet deep, falling at times in sheer, smooth-fronted cliffs, great for climbers. Sweeping curves like the hull of a ship, then in rugged, V-shaped gorges, or with irregular, hilly flanks opening at last through gateways of low, rounded foot-hills out upon the horizontal plain of the San Joaquin and Sacramento.

Every canyon carries a river, derived from constant melting of the perpetual snow, which threads its way down the mountain—a feeble remnant of those vast ice streams and torrents that formerly unloaded the summit accumulation of ice and snow while carving the canyons out from solid rock. Nowhere on the continent of America is there more positive evidence of the cutting power of rapid streams than in these very canyons.

Near the center of the range is the perfection of forest. At the south are the finest specimen trees, at the north the densest accumulations of timber. In riding throughout this whole region and watching the same species from the glorious ideal life of the south gradually dwarfed toward the north, until it becomes a mere dwarf; or in climbing from the scattered, drought-scourged pines of the foot-hills up through the zone of finest vegetation to those summit crags, where, struggling against the power of storms and frost, only a few of the bravest trees succeed in clinging to the rocks and to life,—one sees with novel effect the inexorable sway which climatic conditions hold over the kingdom of trees.

Looking down from the summit, the forest is a closely woven sweater, which has fallen over the body of the range, clinging closely to its form, sinking into the deep canons, covering the hill-tops with even velvety folds, and only lost here and there where a bold mass of rock gives it no foothold, or where around the margin of the mountain lakes bits of alpine meadow lie open to the sun.