Page:The Overland Monthly, Jan-June 1894.djvu/313



MOUNTAIN river of Northern California is a surprise and delight to the traveler who forces his way up the g r a n d ly cut channel that leads to its source in the lava womb of some glacier peak. The journey will often take long daysor weeks of glorious climbing of unnumbered and unnamed ranges, and dull indeed must be the imagination that knows not extraordinary quickening under the wild beauty and freedom of the wayside picturings Here and there in the vast volcanic region stretching from Lassen Peaks to Mount Shasta, an icy, translucent stream leaps to the light in the heaped-up detritus of earthquake material, and immediately begins an exciting race down the gorge to the hoarse blare of its hundred cataracts.

The joyous energy of these young water Titans communicates a boundless exhilaration to the beholder, who treads buoyantly the bright, singing groves where flowers tremble under a ceaseless baptism of jeweled spray. In the crisp, warm sunlight and throughout the short nights, cushioned upon spicy pine feathers, one hears always the chorusing of the cascades,—the vox jubilante of this primeval wilderness, where the hand of the Almighty "scattered the everlasting hills and did cleave the earth with rivers."

These splendid torrents run at right angles to the general trend of the Sierra Nevada, chafing for themselves imposing road ways through metamorphic slate and lava fragments, until merged into the crystal body of the Sacramento. This noble stream is altogether the most important of California's rivers. Its inexhaustible supply of cold, sweet water pouring from that stupendous reservoir, Mount Shasta, is a tribute more precious than gold to its great bordering valley. In the middle part of the State the river is clogged and stained by the constant