Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/41

Rh us to "The Devil's Garden," which, far from being sulphurous in tone, is a large terminal moraine stretching eight miles west of the crater; the sides slope at a high angle, and the surface, like that of our kames in the Eastern States, is flat and of even width, being a quarter to half a mile wide. It looked at first like a lava stream, but the angular blocks of hornblende andesite intermingled with the débris bespoke its glacial origin. On the south of us ran down from the peak high, steep lateral moraines.

Passing above the limit of oak trees, we ascend above the belt of pitch pine and silver pines to the region of firs—speaking botanically, through the belt of Picea amabilis and then higher up to P. nobilis and P. contorta, then to a growth of P.flexilis, which attains an elevation of about ten thousand feet. With these, though mostly in the lower belts, were associated the characteristic shrubs of California, the Manzanita and Ceanothus, also a yellow-flowered, stiff plant like greasewood, which ascends far above the limit of trees. The silver-leafed P. contorta, near the upper edge of the timber line, grows from twenty to thirty feet high and from twelve to sixteen inches in diameter, with a very white bark. A zone of firs is situated between it and the highest pines. P. flexilis seems to be only a variety of P. contorta; it is more or less procumbent, lying down flat, covering yawning chasms or seams in the rough lava, so that one can walk upon the trunks and branches when they bridge the spaces between the angular, jagged blocks of lavas.

Late in the afternoon we selected a level place near a bank of snow at an elevation of about nine thousand five hundred feet, and, gathering a few logs of dead pines, we made a rousing fire, and at nighfallnightfall [sic] unrolled our heavy California blankets, sleeping nearer the stars than I ever had before. It was a clear, cold night; the water froze nearly an inch thick, and at 6.15 the next morning, when we began our ascent of the crater, the thermometer was 25° F.

We rode our horses for an hour until we came to the foot of the ash cone, and by 8.45 were on the summit of the crater. The view in the clear atmosphere was indeed a wide one. Far to the northwest was the Siskiyou range and Pilate's Knob, and to the west the jagged, saw-toothed, snowy peaks of the Salmon Mountains; fifty miles southward was the snow-clad solitary Lassens Peak, twelve thousand feet high; while Klamath Lakes and the lava beds, the seat of the late Modoc war, lay to the northeast-ward.

The scene was a wild one within the great crater, whose narrow edge is formed of sharp, jagged peaks and pinnacles. Broad, almost unbroken snow fields extended from the edge down for a thousand feet; at the bottom were two frozen lakes like sheets of