Stories of California Part 9

People expect and hope for much rain in this so-called winter, since a wet year a.s.sures good crops to the state. But the amount of rain that falls is very uncertain. It does not rain every day, nor all day, as a rule, and each storm seems different. Sometimes a "southeaster" blows up from the j.a.pan Current, or Black Stream, as the j.a.panese call the warm, dark-blue waters that pour out of the China Sea. This current of the Pacific Ocean flows along our coast in a mighty river a thousand miles wide, and gives California its peculiar climate of cool summers and moist, warm winters. The southeasterly wind ruffles the bay with white-capped waves and dashes sheets of rain against window and roof.

Then the wind changes, and all the clouds go flying to north or east, while from the clear blue sky brilliant suns.h.i.+ne pours down to make the gra.s.s and flowers grow. During the winter months the sun is strong and warm enough to make out-door life delightful.

The farmer depends greatly upon the rainfall. In a wet winter the moisture sinks far into the ground, but not so deep that the thirsty little roots cannot find it in the summer. Early rains are needed to soften the ground for November ploughing, and young grain and crops of all kinds need rain through April. In the northern part of the state the wet season begins earlier and lasts longer than in the south, while the southeastern corner is an almost rainless desert.

In San Francisco the thermometer seldom falls below 45 in the winter, the average for the season being 51. Perhaps in January or February the sidewalks may be white with frost in the mornings, or hail may fall during some cold rain-storm. Once in five years or so, enough snow falls to make children go wild with delight over a few s...o...b..a.l.l.s which are very soon melted. People can be comfortable the year round without fires, and the clear, bright winter days with soft air and warm suns.h.i.+ne are always pleasant enough to spend outdoors. This ocean climate, due to the warm sea air, is enjoyed by the counties facing the coast and San Francis...o...b..y. In the valleys of the interior white frosts are frequent, and thin ice forms on the wayside puddles.

Once in a while killing frosts destroy fruit blossoms and cut down the garden flowers and vegetables, but seldom do more damage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "EL CAPITAN" (3300 feet in height).]

[Ill.u.s.tration: YOSEMITE FALLS.]

In mountain regions, above five or six thousand feet, the very cold winter lasts six or seven months. Snow falls almost constantly and drifts to a great depth. Small lakes are frozen and buried in snow, and the trees are bent and weighed down with ice and sleet. Many of the wild animals come down to the foot-hills below the snow-line to spend the winter; but the bear curls himself up in his warm cave and sleeps through the cold months. In this snowy zone of the Sierras, about thirty miles wide, winter lasts from the first snowfall, about the end of October, to the late spring of June. Then July and August are months of glorious weather, with clear, dry air and a cloudless sky. During the day the temperature of about 80 degrees melts much snow, and the rivers carry it away in rus.h.i.+ng torrents and falls of icy water. In September the frost turns the leaves of all but the evergreen trees beautiful colors of red and yellow. Indian summer comes during September and October, when the days are sunny and warm, and then the long winter sets in again. Peaks above eight thousand feet are snow-clad on their crests and along their sides by deep drifts the year round.

Along the Pacific coast in summer cool sea-winds, called trade-winds, blow in from the ocean, and 60 degrees is the average temperature. The farther you go inland from the coast, the hotter it gets, and the heat is very great in the interior of the state. In the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys it is often over 100 degrees in the shade, though this dry heat is not hard to bear, and the nights are always cool enough for one to sleep in comfort.

Summer fogs are usual in the coast counties. The mornings are pleasant and sunny till about eleven o'clock. At this time the sun's rays grow stronger in the interior valleys, and the hot air rises while trade-winds rush in from the cold ocean and fog settles down like a thick, gray cloud over the bay and hills. July and August are cold and foggy along the coastline, with strong west winds almost every day. In September the winds die away, and sometimes a shower or two falls.

The rainless desert, or southeastern corner of our state, is the hottest region of all. Here the sun glares down till sand and rocks seem heated by a fiery furnace. Every living creature gasps and pants for breath in the scorching heat. There are no trees, but only cactus, that queer, p.r.i.c.kly, th.o.r.n.y plant, often fifteen or twenty feet high in these wastes of sand, and low greasewood bushes. Under this vegetation snakes, lizards, and horned toads bask all day and search for food at night. If travellers wander from the road in crossing the desert, they are easily lost, and sometimes they die or go mad in the terrible heat. There are no springs, and water stations are a long way apart, so that lost people usually die of thirst. As the heat of the sun's rays quivers over the burning sands, a curious sight called a mirage is often produced. A cool, gla.s.sy lake or flowing river bordered with green trees seems pictured in the air, and the hot and weary traveller can scarcely believe that only sand and rocks are before him.

Can you tell which season you like the best? You will find the one you choose in some part of this favored state. It is always summer in the south, and you may slide on the ice or throw s...o...b..a.l.l.s all year in the high Sierras.

SOME WONDERFUL SIGHTS

California is a wonderland where snowy mountains, mighty and ancient forests, glaciers and geysers, lakes and waterfalls, foaming rivers and the cliffs and rolling surf down her long sea-coast give new and beautiful pictures at every place.

Through the whole state stretches the granite backbone of the Sierra Nevadas with its highest crest or ridge at the head-waters of the Kings and Kern rivers near Fresno. Here Mount Whitney and a dozen other great peaks of the High Sierras or California Alps lift their heads over thirteen thousand feet in the air. Here are to be seen most magnificent panoramas of lofty peaks, deep canons, towering domes, and snow-clad summits. The finest forests, too, in the world grow on the slopes of the Sierras, the immense pines and giant _sequoias_ of the General Grant and other National Parks in this section being the largest and oldest of all. Kings River Canon is a rugged gorge half a mile deep with the river rus.h.i.+ng through it in thundering rapids and cascades.

The well-known Yosemite Valley is the gorge of the Merced River and, though only eight miles long and half a mile wide, holds the grandest of all our mountain scenery. The mighty rock El Capitan, over three thousand feet in height, stands at the entrance to the valley, and across from it is Bridal Veil Fall, a snowy cascade so thin you can see the face of the mountain through the falling waters. There are many waterfalls, but the Yosemite is chief of them all. Here the river takes a plunge of sixteen hundred feet, the water falling like snowy rockets bursting into spray from that great height.

Then, for six hundred feet more, the torrent leaps and foams through a trench it has cut out of the solid rock to the cliff, from which it takes a second plunge. This Lower Yosemite fall is four hundred feet high, the rus.h.i.+ng waters turning into clouds of spray, which the wind tosses from side to side. At Nevada Fall the Merced River leaps six hundred feet at a bound, strikes a ma.s.s of rocks halfway down, and breaks into white foam upon which rainbows play when the sun s.h.i.+nes through the misty veil.

Besides the grand Sentinel Rock, Eagle Peak, Clouds' Rest, and other high mountains in the Yosemite Valley, many domes or round-topped peaks like the heads of buried giants loom up, the most famous being South Dome, Was.h.i.+ngton Column, Liberty Cap, and Mount Broderick.

But no one can picture this wonderful valley with pen or brush or camera and give its real charm. You must see it yourself to know and understand the beauty of great mountains and falling waters, of Mirror Lake with its fine reflections of the surrounding scenery, and of the rus.h.i.+ng torrent of the Merced River in its swift coursing through this mighty canon of the Yosemite. Thousands of tourists and sightseers visit the valley from May to October. Then snow begins to fall and winter sets in, as it does everywhere in the high Sierras. Very deep snow-drifts cover the ground, lakes and rivers freeze, and the great falls are fringed with icicles, while a large ice cone forms at the foot of the falling water. Many beautiful pictures may be found in the valley in winter when Jack Frost is ruler of all the snow-clad, ice-bound canon.

Scattered throughout the Sierras are other valleys almost as fine as the Yosemite. These are not often reached by the army of summer sight-seers, but true mountaineers find them. One valley which has fine scenery is the Grand Canon of the Tuolumne, the gorge being twenty-five miles long, with walls so high and steep that once entered one must go through to the end. The Tuolumne River rushes, with terrible force and speed, in cascades and rapids down the granite stairway which is the floor of this canon. The walls of the gorge rise so high that the traveller only sees a tiny strip of blue sky far above him, and the great pine trees on top of these cliff walls seem only the length of one's finger.

It is supposed that all these valleys have been formed by glaciers, which during the ice age, thousands of years ago, filled the canons and swept over the mountains. These ma.s.ses of ice, moving very slowly, ground and tore up the rocks under and around them till deep gorges and steep, high cliffs were left in their tracks. Most of the glaciers melted long ago, but on Mount Lyell, on Shasta, and a few of the Sierra summits may still be found those ever-living ice-rivers, the one on Mount Lyell being the source of the Tuolumne River.

California is rich in lakes, especially in the mountains where the melting snows gather in every hollow and form lakelets in chains or groups, or in one large body of water like Tahoe, Donner, or Tenaya lakes.

One of the most beautiful lakes in the world is Lake Tahoe. It is six thousand feet above sea-level, and the mountains around it rise four thousand feet higher. On these peaks snow-drifts lie the year round above the "snow-line," as a height over eight or nine thousand feet is called. Nevada, treeless and barren, is on the eastern side of Lake Tahoe, while the western or California side is green and thickly wooded with beautiful pines. But the first thing one would notice, perhaps, is the wonderful clearness of the lake water. As one stands on the wharf the steamer _Tahoe_ seems to be hanging in the clear green depths with her keel and twin propellers in plain sight. The fish dart under her and all about as in some large aquarium. There a big lake-trout shoots by like a silver streak of light, or here is a school of hundreds of little fingerlings. Every stick or stone shows on the bottom as one starts out on the steamer, and as one sails along where the water is sixty or seventy feet deep. In the middle the lake's depth is fifteen hundred feet and the water is a dark indigo-blue. At the edge and along shallow places the color is bright green, as at Emerald Bay, a beautiful inlet three miles long. Lake Tahoe is twenty miles in length and about five wide, and its icy cold waters are of crystal clearness and very pure.

Fallen Leaf Lake is a smaller Tahoe, and Donner Lake, not far from Truckee, and now the camping-place of many a summer visitor, is the place where years ago the Donner overland party spent a terrible winter in the Sierra snows.

Clear Lake and the Blue Lakes in Lake County are delightful places to visit, and in this county, too, are the geysers. Some wonderful curiosities are seen here. You will find springs that spout up a stream of hot water every few minutes, mineral springs from which you can have a drink of soda water, and an acid spring that flows lemonade. Alum, iron, or sulphur waters, either hot or cold, bubble up out of the ground at every turn. At one spring you may boil an egg. Other springs are used for steam baths and also hot mud-baths. In Geyser Canon is the strange place every sight-seer hurries to at once.

Such rumblings and thunderings, such hot vapors and gases come from the cracks in the ground, that the Indians thought this was the workshop where the bad spirit which white people call the devil used to live and work. The deeper one goes into this canon, the hotter and noisier it gets. All round are signs telling where it is dangerous to step, while the ground is hot, and boiling water runs by in little streams. Steam rises from many pools, and the sulphur smell almost chokes one. Another curious spring, called the devil's inkstand, seems full of ink. Mount St. Helena, near here, is a dead or extinct volcano, and probably there are fires in the earth under this region which keep up these steam and sulphur springs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NATURAL BRIDGE, SANTA CRUZ.]

Many of the Sierra summits are capped with volcanic rock, and La.s.sen's Peak and Mount Shasta are extinct volcanoes. There are hot springs and cracks from which steam and sulphur rise on both of these mountains, and as earthquakes often shake the earth in different parts of the state we know that underground fires are still at work. A great piece of land on Mount San Jacinto in Southern California lately sank down about a hundred feet, and cracks both deep and wide show that some force from below gave a thorough shaking-up to that part of the state.

Mono, Owen's, and several other large lakes are the "sinks" into which rivers flow and lose themselves in the sandy or marshy sh.o.r.es. These lakes have soda or salt in their waters, and great stretches of dry alkali lands around them. The famous Death Valley is a dry lake of this kind where the sun beats down on the white alkali plain till it is almost certain death to try to cross it without a guide. The Salton Sea is a dry lake where almost pure salt is dug out, and great quant.i.ties of borax and of soda are found in other beds, of dried-up streams and lakes.

But to tell of all the curious things nature has to show us in California,--of the forests of petrified trees, of the caverns cut out of the ocean cliffs by restless waves, or of those in the mountains or the Modoc lava-beds,--well, you will see most of them, let us hope, in your vacations. A large book might be given to the wonderful sights of this great state, and it may be your fortune to visit and so always remember a few we have named.