CHAPTER XITHE VALLEY OF TEN THOUSAND SMOKES
CHAPTER XI
THE VALLEY OF TEN THOUSAND SMOKES
The next morning they had a good look around before deciding which way to go. On one side pointed firs in patches on the canyon walls contrasted with the snow in the ravines. There was a brook that divided, then reunited in white strands, only to spread out into a smooth, glistening sheet, golden in the sunlight, to join the green river.
The notches between two rounding, glacier-smoothed granite masses disclosed distant peaks, snow-capped, their jagged ledges thrusting through the mantling white, dazzling in the sunshine like a mirror,—now gray under a hazing sky, now dappled under a passing shower cloud.
They finally decided to wind through the gap, and Pedro, Norris and Long Lester started on with the burros, while Ace and Ted started fine-combingthe map beneath them for the elusive Mexicans. Very probably, they thought, they had been hiding in some of the caves that honeycombed the region, and sooner or later they would have to reappear. Their supplies could not hold out forever.
All along the Western flank of the Sierra, (as both Norris and Long Lester were able to assure them), from the McCloud River in the North to the Kaweah,—a distance of at least 400 miles,—stretched a belt of metamorphic limestone, reaching up to as high as 7,000 feet, and it was fairly riddled with caves.
But again the day went by without success. Ace only squared his chin. Ted offered to abdicate his observer’s seat in favor of any one of the party, but Pedro and Long Lester preferred terra firma, and even Norris found more to interest him in the rocks beneath their feet.
Once a little spiral of smoke drew them to a canyon head where they found three fishermen with a pack train of seven horses,—but no Mexicans. They searched Southward along the John Muir trail, returning along the Eastern flank,—but to no purpose, so far as the fugitives were concerned.
As no one had had time to fish, they dined on tinned corned beef, which Ace, the cook for the day, made the mistake of salting. (After that he had to make tea twice.)
“One thing I’d like fer to ask you, Mr. Norris,” said Long Lester that night around the bon-fire, “is where does the salt in the ocean come from? I don’t see for the life of me, from what you’ve told us––”
“The salt was originally in the rock of the earth’s crust,” Norris explained with a pleased smile at the old man’s interest. “As this igneous rock weathered with time, the rain and the streams washed it into the ocean. Then when the sea water evaporates––”
“To make clouds, to make more rain?” Long Lester recited.
“Yes,—the salt of course remained behind, so that the oceans have been growing constantly saltier since the earth began. Yet even now sea water must be nine-tenths evaporated before the sodium begins to precipitate, as we say.”
“So there is room for a lot more.”
“Especially as the oceans are growing larger all the time.”
“But doesn’t the ocean give it back to theland when it leaves these sediments along the shore?”
“Not to any extent, speaking comparatively. But one of the interesting things about the salt in the sea is this: Chemists and geologists estimate that, for the amount of salt in the sea, enough of the original earth crust must have been weathered away to have covered the continents over 6,000 feet high. And that calculation just about fits what we believe to have happened.
“The United States Geological Survey gave out an official statement in 1912 that this country is annually being washed back into the ocean at the rate of two hundred and seventy million tons of matter dissolved in the streams and five hundred and thirteen millions of tons of matter held in suspension in the same streams. That is to say, the oceans every year receive from the surface of the United States seven hundred and eighty-three millions of tons of rock materials.
“That means that, here in this part of the country at least, one hundred and seventy-seven tons per square mile are being washed back each year.”
“Gee!” said Ted. “I should think, at thatrate, that the continents would have been all washed away long ago.”
“Yes, there have been, since geological history began, at least twenty whole mountain ranges as high as the Rockies worn to sea level. Of course the oceans have periodically flooded the margins of the continents at such times, in long troughs where now stand our Appalachian and Rocky Mountain ranges, leaving their deposits.
“In the Rockies there are coarse sediments miles deep, together with limestone formed of the ground-up shells of marine animals of the earlier times. Now think of this!
“If all that stands above sea level in the United States to-day were to be washed into the sea, as it undoubtedly will be, in time,—(but not in our time), the level of the oceans will rise, (just as the level of a half glass of water rises if you drop in a handful of sand), until—it has been estimated—everything under six hundred and fifty feet above sea level will be inundated. That means that probably half of the continent would be under water. It has been so in times past, and it will be again. In fact, in the age of reptile dominance, (the CretaceousPeriod), when the earth was just beginning to be peopled with birds and flying reptiles, and the first, primitive mammals,—the Atlantic flowed straight from what is now the Gulf of Mexico, through what is now the Rocky Mountain Region, and through the Eastern part of Alaska, to the Arctic. That left one strip of land that reached along what is now the Pacific Coast, clear from the Isthmus of Panama to the Aleutian Islands and straight across to Siberia. The Northern part of the Atlantic Coast formed another land area, broken by the fresh water bodies of America and Canada and in one with a strip of land that extended across Greenland to Europe.
“It is pretty well established, in fact, that the United States has been more or less flooded by warm, shallow marine waters at least sixteen times since the age of fish dominance began. But not since the age of man!” he hastened to assure the old prospector, who was beginning to look uneasy.
“Of course these flood times brought a moist, warm climate to the land areas, and life was easy for the then existing animal forms. Then when readjustments in the earth’s crust againraised up mountain ranges and the climate became colder and drier, the struggle for existence became more intense, the process of evolution was stimulated, and new forms originated.
“We are living in one of those periods now. The organic world is being stimulated to develop even better bodies, endowed with even more alert brains.
“Life is easiest of all for the inhabitants of the ocean. That is why they have developed so little intelligence.”
“Is that why it’s such an insult to call any one a poor fish?” grinned Ted.
“An ichthyosaurus?” supplemented Ace.
“As has been said before,” Norris took up the thread of his talk, “with a drier climate and soil, comes the need of developing a faster mode of locomotion, for food no longer lies or swims everywhere about, as it did in the ocean, and in the swamps, and tropic humidity. Food and water are scarce, and it is the speediest animal that fulfills his needs. This speediness on his part means that he uses up more energy, and hence needs more food, and he needs to assimilate it faster. In other words, it means increased metabolism. This in turn means thathe keeps his body at a higher temperature. He needs it too, now, with the increased cold. This results in the development of warm blood, by which the animal can maintain his body warmth regardless of winter cold. If it had not been for conditions that forced certain reptiles to develop warm-bloodedness, we would have no birds or mammals to-day, for as you doubtless know, birds and mammals both were evolved from reptiles.”
“I swan!” was all the old prospector could say.
“Yes, the first mammals developed from a reptile known as the cynodont. Many of these reptiles had long legs and could travel with the body well off the ground. Birds originated from the same reptilian stock as did the dinosaurs. First their hind-legs grew long so that they could run on them,—and you will notice at the Museum how the legs of a dinosaur are joined to the body exactly like a bird's,—then their scales gradually evolved into feathers.
“There is a lot more to it than I can tell you now, but after various ups and downs, dinosaurs became extinct and Nature tried out several kinds of warm-blooded, furry mammals,some of them herbivorous and built for speed to run away from their enemies, some of them swamp-dwelling monsters with heavy legs and small brains, who, slow of movement, relied on horns and other armor and sharp teeth for their defense.
“But there is no end to this subject. I only mean to make the point that it was geological changes that drove the fish to land, and the land animal to higher forms, till finally other geological changes drove man’s ancestors down out of the trees.” The boys, no less than the old prospector, testifying their interest in the last named operation, he continued.
“When the Alps, the Andes and the Himalayas arose, man’s ancestors still lived in trees. But high mountains hold a large part of the moisture of the atmosphere in the form of snow and ice, and at the same time the decreased oceanic areas offer less surface for evaporation. Not only does that mean a drier climate, but the sun’s rays pass more freely through dry air, and the days are hotter, and the heat passing freely back through the same dry air at night, the nights are colder. Seasons are more extreme, and ice accumulates on the mountaintops and around the polar region, precursor of a glacier period. The aridity decreases the amount of forest, and the manlike tree dweller had to descend to the ground to get his living. That necessitated the development of his hind legs for speed, and that speed necessitated his assuming a wholly erect posture. That in turn freed his hands, and he, or the man descended from him, could defend himself by throwing stones at the huge beasts who then peopled the earth. The cold winters necessitated the use of the skins of beasts for clothing, and so on through the list. It was geological necessity that drove man into his higher development.
“Changes of climate and environment, however, are stimulating, even to-day. Statistics show that stormy weather actually increases people’s energy.”
The next day they passed a long crack in a rock slope, which Norris felt sure had been made by an earthquake, perhaps as recent as that of 1906, to judge from the cleanness and newness of it. The crack was no more than a foot or two in width, but in places eight feet deep, they estimated, and along the Westernside of it stood a fault scarp, in this case a wall of granite bowlders of various sizes up to four or five feet in height.
“This,” pronounced the geology man, “is evidently a region overlying subterranean volcanoes, which might even yet build the range higher. I’ll bet that kind of mountain building may still be going on around here.”
Again and again Norris, or even Ace, had been able to point out, in the record of the rocks, the evidences of the two glacier periods that had helped shape the Sierra Nevada, the earlier one much larger, and enduring longer, as shown by the moraines (or deposits) left behind. The lower end of a canyon would be no wider than the stream that incised it, but the upper portion would have been smoothed into grassy parks or lakelets on each tread of a giant stairway to the summit of the range.
Rounded waterworn pebbles and cobblestones among a mass of angular bowlders, left behind by glacier streams, together with an occasional striated pebble, were “sermons in stones” to the geologist.
“Hey, Ted,” his chum had challenged him that day, “did you ever see a pirate?”
“Don’t know as I did,” admitted the ranch boy.
“Then I’ll show you one. Climb in,” and he prepared to search once more for the Mexicans.
“Show me one! You speak as if they kept them in museums.”
“This pirate will be a river. A river pirate,—I mean a pirate river! If I could find the divide just North of Muah Mountain I’d show you where streams are being captured this minute. Cottonwood Creek has already captured one of the tributaries of Mulkey Creek, I hear, and diverted it into an eastward flow, and further captures are likely to be pulled off any time. Isn’t it a scandal?”
“I say, Ace,” protested his chum, “I’ve swallowed a lot since we started on this trip, but I’m not so gullible as you seem to think.”
“Look here, old kid,” said Ace seriously. “It’s a fact. Along a divide, a stream flowing one way will divert one flowing the other way into its own channel.”
They found a pirate river,—but still no trace of the incendiaries. However, that merely determined the Senator’s son the more.
That night Norris told them the long promised tale of his Alaskan trip.
“Nothing like the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes has ever been seen by the eye of man,” he declared. “If we could take all the other volcanic regions of the world to-day and set them down side by side, they would present less of a spectacle, except, of course, at the time of a dangerous eruption. There has been nothing like it in the memory of man,—though geologists can read from the rocks that such conditions must have existed in past ages. The Mt. Katmai eruption of 1912, one of the most dangerous in history, first attracted attention to this region, and the National Geographic Society has since sent various expeditions to Alaska. It was that way that the Valley came to be discovered, in 1916.
“I happened to be a member of the last expedition.”
“Honestly!” the boys exclaimed.
“Yes, and I tell you, boys, when I first looked through Katmai Pass, it just looked as if the whole valley were full of smoke. Of course it was steam.”
“Weren’t you afraid of another volcano?” asked the boys, snuggling down ready for a real story.
“No, because with all those vents letting off steam, it must relieve the pressure from below, like so many safety-valves. Two black, glassy looking lava mountains guard the pass. The wind on the side of Observation Mountain was blowing so hard it honestly lifted us off our feet at times, and it blew a hail of pumice stone in our faces that literally cut the flesh. Of course we wore goggles.
“Once in the valley, there were certainly all of ten thousand smokes rising from the ground. We were simply speechless, it was such an awesome spectacle.”
“I’ll bet you were!” breathed Ted.
“Personally, I consider it more wonderful than either the Grand Canyon or the geysers of the Yellowstone. As far as we could see in any direction,—and there seemed to be three arms to the valley,—the white vapor was steaming out of the ground until it mingled with a great cloud that hung between the mountain walls. And we later camped in places where we could keep our food in a hollow of a glacierwhile we boiled our breakfast in a steam hole, and the ground was almost too warm for comfort.”
“Must have been an ideal camping place,” said Ace.
“Far from that. Too much danger of breaking through. And then of course there wasn’t a tree or a grass blade anywhere, much less a stick of firewood. But we sure had steam heat at night, and we cooked, in the milder of the fumaroles.”
“Wasn’t there a lot of gas coming up with the steam?” asked Ace.
“Yes, but it didn’t taint our food any. It was an ideal steam cooker. Farther down the valley were some vents hot enough to fry bacon.”
“I should think it would have steamed it,” said Ted.
“No, we found one vent where the steam came so hot that it didn’t condense for several feet above ground; the only trouble was that the frying pan had a tendency to go flying up in the air and the cook had to have a strong arm to hold it down.”
At the picture his memory evoked, Norrisburst into hearty chuckles. “As the bacon got crisp, of course it didn’t weigh so heavy, and there always came a point where it began to fly out of the pan. Then we’d all stand around, and it was the liveliest man that caught the most breakfast.
“There was another camp convenience, too, there in Hades, as the valley has been named.”
“Thar, didn’t I tell you so?” triumphed Long Lester.
“And they named the river Lethe. A river that ran down from the melting glaciers,—though it almost all goes up in smoke, as it were,—in steam, before it gets out of the hot part. This river whirls along, and in places the steam actually boils up through the ice water, or along the banks. I used to think it was an awful pity there were no fish in that stream, because we could have cooked them without taking them off the hook.”
“Huh!” The old prospector shook his head. “I’ve thought all along this here was a fish story.”
“But it’s gospel truth,” Norris assured him. “I mean about the valley. Isaidthere were no fish. Everything we ate, by the way, had to bepacked in on our backs. It was no place for horses, where in places the ground fairly shook beneath our feet, and if it were to give way, we’d find ourselves sure enough in hot water.”
“It must have been almighty dangerous,” gasped Ted.
“Well, not after we learned the ropes. Sometimes we accidentally put a foot through a thin place and steam came through. I assure you we stepped lively then. At other times our feet sank into the soft, hot mud.
“By the way, there is a mountain across the head of the valley that looks like a crouching dog, and it has been named Cerberus.”
“Were those geysers, those ten thousand smokes?” asked the old prospector.
“No, a geyser comes after volcanic activity, while here something is still likely to happen. A geyser begins as a column of steam and hot water, which erupts as often as the water gets to the boiling point. It follows that the water must accumulate in rock not so hot that it would instantly vaporize it. But the rock underlying this valley is so hot that no water can accumulate.”
“How large are the vents through which the steam comes?” asked Ted.
“All sizes down to nothing at all. There are even a few craters 100 feet across, that have been produced by volcanic explosions. You will find these craters, generally, along a large fissure, just the way you find the Aleutian chain of volcanoes along a fissure in the earth’s crust several hundred miles in length.
“There are fissures all along the margins of the valley, besides those in the center, and many of these have one side standing higher than the other, showing them to be earthquake faults,—the same sort of thing we see here in the rocks of the Sierras. And you should hear the hissing and roaring of the steam as it forces its way up through these fissures from the hot depths beneath. Sometimes it looks like blue smoke, it is so full of gases, especially sulphur dioxide, the gas that is given off by burning sulphur. So the popular notion of Hades isn’t so far off after all, eh?”
“Could you smell the sulphur fumes?”
“Sometimes, yes,—when the other gases did not overwhelm the odor. But the weirdest part of all is the incrustations along the borders ofthe vents. All colors of the rainbows—shapes as fantastic as anything in fairyland. Lots of yellow, of course, from the sulphur,—crystals of it, some of them neighbor to an orange tinted crystal, lying in the blue mud. It was a beautiful color combination. Then there were green and gray alum crystals which looked like growing lichens. There were also deep green algæ actually growing. Strange how certain designs are used over and over again in nature! In other places the mud is actually burned brick red, especially where the fumaroles are burnt out. This shades to purple, and in other places to pink. But the most surprising, perhaps, were the white vents just tinted with a delicate pink or cream.
“The largest fissure of all, one lying at the foot of Mt. Mageik, is filled with the clear green water of a melted glacier. And above, the mountain smokes away into the clouds!”
“It must be a marvelous place!” said Ace. “I suppose it was regular ice water.”
Norris laughed. “That is the funny part of it. It’s not. The water is actually warm, or rather, tepid, in places, on account of the heat from below.”
“So you had good swimming even in Alaska.”
“We might have had. And then I must tell you about Novarupta. That’s the largest vent in the valley, and it is something you won’t see very many places in the world, a new volcano. It was only formed at the time of the eruption of 1912, and it is one of the largest volcanoes in the world to-day,—with a crater much larger than that of Vesuvius.”
“But Mr. Norris, do y’ mind my asking,” Pedro hesitated, “but how do you know it is a new volcano? Don’t volcanoes sometimes burst forth again after many years of quiet?”
“They do, but there is where the rocks tell the story again. Instead of bursting forth from a mountain top, through igneous rock, (left from the time when the earth-crust was molten), this one erupted in the valley, in sandstone. On a still day, the smoke will rise as high as ten thousand feet.”
Norris, then a student, had been one of the first to view Lassen Volcano when, in 1914, it broke its slumber of 200 years. Indeed, he had had a real adventure, as the second outburst had caught him within half a mile of the craterand he had barely escaped with his life. Of course the boys had to hear all about it.
While the Sierra south of Lassen has been built more through uplift than volcanic activity, at least since the Tertiary period, he explained, the Cascades and indeed, the whole range to the northward through Oregon and Washington, is a product of lava flow.
Happening to be about to start on a camping trip in the Feather River region at the time of the first eruption, he and his companion had hastened immediately to the scene of so much geological history making. The smoke and ashes that billowed forth had been visible for fifty miles, and the accompanying earthquake shocks had been accompanied by a downpour of rain.
Climbing the path of a recent snow-slide, which had cleared a narrow path in the fifteen-foot drifts, they could smell sulphur strongly from near the South base onward. Veering around to the East, past half a dozen cinder cones, they finally reached a narrow ridge leading directly to, as yet unoccupied, the fire outlook station. Clambering over crags so steep,finally, that they could not see ahead, they came to the little square building, now tattered by the stones that had fallen through its roof, tethered to the few feet of space available by wire cables that seemed to hold it down in the teeth of the winds. Suddenly below them lay the bowl of the ancient crater, bordered by snow fields now gray with ash. That the ash had not been hot they judged from the fact that it had nowise melted the snow, but lay on its surface. From the ragged edge of the steaming basin, yellow with sulphur, rose the oppressive fumes they had been getting more and more strongly. How deep was this funnel to the interior of the earth? To their amazement it appeared to be only about 80 feet deep. That, they decided,—coupled with the fact that the ash and rocks exploded had not been hot, but cold, must be because the sides of the crater, as they gradually caved in, must have choked the neck of the crater with débris, which had been expelled when the smoke and gases had been exploded. There had been no lava flow, then!
They had retraced their steps to perhaps half a mile’s distance when of a sudden the earth beneath their feet began to heave and rumblethunderously. Ashes and rocks, some the size of flour sacks, some huge bowlders, began shooting into the air,—observers at a distance assuring them afterwards that the smoke must have risen 3,000 feet above the peak. It grew black as midnight, the smoke stung their eyes and lungs and whiffs of sulphur nearly overwhelmed them.
It was a position of deadly peril. Quick as thought, they ran, Norris dragging his companion after him, beneath the shelter of an overhanging ledge, where at least the rocks could not fall on them, and there they buried their faces in the snow and waited.
What seemed hours was later pronounced to have been but fifteen minutes, though with the roaring as of mighty winds, and the subterranean grumblings and sudden inky night, the crashing of stones and thundering of rolling bowlders, it seemed like the end of the world.
Norris’s companion had suffered a blow that dislocated his shoulder, but otherwise they emerged unhurt. They afterwards found several areas on the sides of Lassen where sulphurous gases were escaping from pools of hot mud or boiling water. They also visited a lake thathad been formed at the time of the lava flow of 200 years ago, (now a matter of legend among the Pitt River Indians), this lava having formed a dam across a little valley which later filled from the melting snows. The stumps of the inundated trees could still be seen.
A geyser, said the Geological Survey man, is just like a volcano, only it expels steam and boiling water from the interior. There is a line of volcanic activity up and down the Pacific Coast, from Alaska to Central America, though Lassen is the only active peak in California, Shasta having become quiescent save for the hot spring that steams through the snow near its summit.
The North half of the range, he added, is covered with floods of glassy black lava and dotted with extinct craters, whereas the Southern half is almost solid granite, though there are plenty of volcanic rocks to be found among its wild gorges. The rocks around Lassen tell a vivid story of the chain of fire mountains that must have again and again blazed into geysers of molten rock, till the whole smoking range was quenched beneath the ice of that last glacier period, which through the ages has been sculpturingnew lake and river beds, and grinding soil for the rebirth of the mighty forests.
The boys drowsed off that night to dream of fire mountains and explorations in the nether regions.
The next day they planned to bi-plane up and down the John Muir trail again and see if the Mexicans could have crossed to the Eastern side of the range. They might have made their way through some pass, traveling after nightfall and hiding by day, and once on the desert around Mono Lake they would be easy to locate. For it seemed ridiculous that they could actually make a get-away.