1908
THE PACIFIC MONTHLY
Sunset Magazine

THE YOSEMITE VALLEY IN WINTER


By J. Smeaton Chase

      WHEN the Summer sun, drinking thirstily at the accumulated snows on the upper peaks and plateau of Yosemite, has left the falls only a shrunken remembrance of their full grown majesty, the visitors hurriedly abandon the Valley, and, as usual with people in a hurry, leave the best behind. To be sure, there has been some excuse for this behavior in past years, for a long and trying stage journey out had to be reckoned with; but with a railway to serve you, as is now the case, through a most seductive chain of Sierra-Nevada-Mountain and Merced River scenery, beckoning you up to the very gate of the Valley, objection is removed.

      In Summer the Valley is a courteous hostess, gracious, and charmingly arrayed, entertaining you with her pictures of inconceivable beauty; but she keeps her best for those who are not mere afternoon callers. When the emerald brilliance is cleared away, and the amethyst haze has fled westward before the chill from the Sierras, then is the time to revel in her more intimate unfoldings. It is a time of enchantment. The snows of Autumn come and clasp the oaks and cottonwoods in a month's trance, then sift down to melt into the russet meadows; the silence sings fairy-tales in your ears; the nerves of the year relax, and your own with them; it "seems to be always afternoon." The wild life of the Valley goes about its business of larder and corn-bin with a quaint, preoccupied air. Almost the only woodland sounds are the plumping of acorns down on to their warm, brown bed, and the irrepressible chatter of the squirrel. Even his voice has lost some of its pertness, and his small soliloquies sound bird like and shy; but then, after all, he is half a bird.

      To look down at this time into the Valley from over the lip of the chasm - as at Glacier Point, for instance is to have a vision of gorgeous color such as Summer can never match. The great canon blossoms like a vast Autumn flower-bed; and every little troop of cottonwoods, willows, oaks, every platoon of pine and cedar, realizes itself individually to you through the three thousand feet of vacuum-clearness, almost as though you might lean over, and reach down, and pluck the tiny bouquet. This is the time, too, when the sky-magic will be performing its choicest miracles. Far up the Valley will gather and pile up an unearthly counterpart of the majestic shapes that surround you"the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples." One wonders, by the way, in what resounding words that greatest master of imagery would have voiced his thoughts if he could have stood where you stand. There would have been a notable spark struck from the flint of his monumental mind, we may be sure. But perhaps it is better as it is; there would have been one more temptation to our own small, easy-jaded capacities to abuse the privilege of over-using him.

       Then, heralded by the first snow fall, comes Act IV of the great yearly drama. This does not often occur before the end of December, and may cover the floor of the Valley with three or four inches of snow, increasing in depth on the higher levels. The last fluttering pennons of the willows - Autumn's rearguard - are hauled down, and Winter comes into his own. In the cold, keen air, the terrible element in the beauty of the Valley and all scenic beauty must have that element or be insipid comes into play. Every scarp, and cliff, and splinter of all the tremendous array has its own threat, and starts al- most into speech in its curt command of your obedience. El Capitan, no longer a dream-portal to an amethyst fairy-land, is now a steel- helmeted, dark-browed despot; the Three Brothers stoop, brooding, like Atlases under an intolerable load.

      Across the Valley, The Sentinel stands sternly aloof; Half Dome gloomily fronts his sundered brother across the gulf; Clouds' Rest and a score of other High Mightinesses stand withdrawn, absorbed, pondering. But when, now and again, one or another of the giants releases himself of his load of snow, the silence is broken by a deep, shattering roar. From end to end of the Valley, peak answers peak in solemn antiphon; the great scarp of Half Dome catches the mighty sound and flings it over to North Dome, who tosses it on to The Sentinel. A moment or two it reverberates among his multitudinous crags as he rolls and wraps it together, to hurl it across to high Eagle Peak. Cathedral Rocks takes it up, and the deep diapason growls and mutters a moment there, then sharply breaks on El Capitan, and dies away with short, rocket-like reports under his overhanging battlements.

      Sometimes it is the finger of Frost, working silently with his Archimedean lever, that starts this noble concert. At such an occasion the writer lately "assisted." The night had been cold, even on the floor of the Valley; on the plateau, three to four thousand feet higher, there may have been, perhaps, fifteen degrees of frost. About two o'clock in the afternoon, out of a cloudless sky, suddenly came the crackling explosion of a thunderstorm. It was The Sentinel, shooting a modest hundred tons or so of granite neatly off his shoulder, like a coal-heaver delivering a "hundred," with precision and unconcern. For five hundred feet the enormous boulder fell sheer, then struck, burst with a report like a park of artillery volleying, and filled the air with a million fragments. These continued their career in huge leaps to the floor of the Valley, accompanied by a host of smaller boulders which they dislodged in their course. From my station, only the first leap was in view, the lower path of the slide being hidden behind a knife-like buttress. from behind which, and from the first point of impact, rose into the air great, slowly - spreading, billowy clouds, like the cumulus clouds of a Summer day. It was the powder of granite, pulverized fine as flour. A pine tree of a hundred and fifty feet height, growing near the very bottom of the course of the slide, was found to be cut clean off at about one-half its height by a flying scrap of stone. The occurrence reminded one of the fun there must have been in the merry days of old (what in military science might be called the Stone Age) when it was a crude but effective device of men besieged in castles or walled towns to roll rocks and boulders of convenient sizes down upon the heads of the ambitious persons who were bent upon coming upstairs on the scaling-ladders.

      When the second or third snow has fallen on the Valley floor, you might easily think yourself in Norway, for then the dwellers in the Valley ferret out their Winter footgear, and ski-ing (it is not for nothing that it rhymes with flying) takes the place of the more commonplace means of getting about; or, it the snow be soft, snowshoes are re- sorted to. Young America, especially, then tastes the choicest tang of the joie de vivre, and there is a new version needed of "the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, and shining morning face, crawling like snail unwillingly to school." Who would not go to school, when one goes shod like Mercury, skimming through a white-and-crystal play ground, and breathing air that whips one's blood into a gallop? There ought to be a poet among that handful of shining morning faces that con their lessons in the little white-curtained schoolhouse; if not a Longfellow, or a Whittier, to sing us noble verse, then a Muir, loving, and teaching us to love, everything living, from a glacier down, or up, to "the hyssop that groweth out of the wall."

      The Air-Spirit, who lays his embargo in Winter on so much of his brothers' kingdoms of Earth and Water, cannot quite impose his rule upon the streams that pour down into the Valley, forming the renowned waterfalls of Yosemite, Bridal Veil, Vernal and Nevada. In fact, he cannot catch them; they are too quick for him. But he has his fantastic way with them where they fall, exhausted by their prodigious leaps, and builds around their feet his most ingenious architectural devices. Of all these, the most imposing is the great ice-cone that grows every Winter under the Upper Yosemite Fall. The Yosemite Creek here lands from the first of his three headlong plunges, sixteen hundred feet sheer, and there grows up gradually this vast cone, until it reaches a height of over five hundred feet. The great volumes of spray; constantly congealing around the spot where the water meets the rock, add daily to the mass of ice, and this is as constantly broken away from the top in huge blocks, which roll away down the slope of the ever - growing hill, like lava blocks down the sides of a volcano. Into the crater of this cone shoots the icy water of the great fall, with a hoarse, stunning roar, and issues at the foot, from a vast crevasse, to take its second and third leaps to the floor of the Valley. A sight more superb, and a sound more terrific, it would be hard to imagine; and anyone hungering for adventures of the Alpine variety will find that there is no reproach of child's-play attached to Yosemite Winter - mountaineering.

      The other falls have each their own ever - changing phantasmagorias of glittering cave and fretted icicle; a perpetual transformation-scene, but with a background always of those Titanic peaks, and domes, and monoliths it is impossible not to endow them with conscious life - standing impassive, arm folded; their cold, grey foreheads wearing that look of infinite age; no longer, as under a dreamy Summer sun, objects to be pointed out, and remarked upon, but beings, to be listened to reverently, with bated breath, as they speak in soundless, awful language, one to the other, of elemental things.

      To the lover of trees there is unending joy in the Winter forest-scenery of the Valley. The stately pines and cedars, whose smooth, enormous shafts stand up out of the earth like pillars of unmoving rock, are christened and anointed with the purest symbol of purity. The Psalmist's fine conjunction of words, Strength and Beauty, best expresses them. The oaks show you their every extremest twig outlined in sooty blackness under its clinging silver duplicate. The cottonwoods, reft of the last of their leaf - coinage of pale gold, glow in the most delicate lilac tones from head to foot. And on the ground, the little sticks and wires of reed and stalk stand up brittly through the white blanket, every leaf and thorn choicely outlined in diamond - dust by the hoar-frost. Acorn and pine-nut lie foot-deep under the snow. But note now the squirrel's cunning, and expound it if you can. You will see him come slipping along like a shadow, stopping every few yards and turning his head so as to train the concentrated intelligence of one eye upon some quite innocent looking spot of snow. By some potent divining rod mystery that this small scientist has the secret of, he sees that snug acorn cuddling below, and, tingling to the very whisker-tips, plies pick and shovel until only the tip of his electric tail remains in view. A minute will see him up again, his hairy cheek bulging like a Jack-tar's with his quid, scuttling back to his seat on his dining table; and five minutes more will see him repeat the performance with unerring certainty.

      The early Winter season may give you sight of a bear. The writer wishes it to be noted that he says may, and not will. His own great expectations in this regard have been disappointed; but then, they always are. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that they are reasonably plentiful, and, since the banishment of firearms from the Valley, almost unreasonably tame. So, at least, one may suppose from it being necessary for instructions to be issued "not to throw stones at the bears." It would occur to most people as more natural to request the bears not to throw stones at the men; but it is somewhat in line with Mr. Muir's amusing account of his first interview with a Sierra bear. When he had studied him for a time unseen, he suddenly rushed toward the bear to frighten him, in order that he might note his gait as he ran. The bear, however, declined to furnish him with that interesting knowledge, but, on the contrary, held his ground in a fighting attitude, whereupon, as Mr. Muir puts it, his own mistake "became monstrously plain."

      In the marvellously clear Winter air, you may often see the eagle, circling high above the loftiest peaks as he surveys his great under-world, or sailing with unmoving, level wings midway along the high white wall of Eagle Peak, his wing-tip seeming almost to scrape the rock, and his blue shadow hung close below him. On the face of some such precipice as Sentinel Rock, where some giant flake of granite is peeling away, the great bird, to whom solitude is the very breath of life, may build and breed without chance of molestation; and on the vast, wrinkled plateau that stretches north, east and south of the Valley, he has a hunting-ground such as suits even his lordly taste; while the whole panorama of the snow-clad High Sierras provides him with a congenial outlook.

      And then, to all the charms of Winter day in the Yosemite there must be added the cheerful, human pleasures of the night. When the red, Winter-sunset light, after burning out like a lighthouse on the cap of El Capitan, streams up the Valley, putting its torch to peak after peak, and plays for a short half-hour day on the oval mirror of Half Dome, then is slowly quenched by the climbing dusk; and the stars prick through the deepening purple sky, then the mighty walls draw closer, and impend over you like vast, rising clouds. The hollow, echoing throb of Yosemite Fall strikes more loudly on the ear. And when the door is closed on the frosty air, and the firelight is dancing as the logs in the generous hotel fireplace crackle and spurt their miniature bombardment, then one's fancy goes roaming up the chimney with the sparks, and makes the round again of those solemn warders set about this Winter Valley of Enchantment.




Accompanying Photographs:
{YVRR}Bagby Bridge, on the New Yosemite Valley Railway.
Yosemite Falls (2634 feet) Flanked With Ice.
Ice Cone at the Foot of Upper Yosemite Falls.
Foot of Bridal Veil Fall; Winter.
{YVRR}Entering Box Canon Enroute to Yosemite.
Vernal Falls in Winter.
{YVRR}Merced River Canon, Enroute to Yosemite.
Going to School, Yosemite.