The hermit of the Glaciers.
ON a beautiful ranch nestling among the foothills above Martinez dwells a man who has out-Thoreaued Thoreau, and gained for himself an international reputation as a close observer of nature in her most awful moods, and yet whose personality is probably as little known to the world at large as that of the recluse of Walden Pond to the contemptuous world about him.
For something over two years Thoreau dwelt by Walden Pond and kept his famous and fascinating record of the wild life about him, but for more than thirteen years John Muir dwelt, solitary, among the fastnesses of the high Sierras, beside the great glaciers that have been the study of his lifetime. Away to the northwest, in the mountains of Alaska, stands the little hut whore he dwelt for some years and made his observations of Muir Glacier; and here and there, on Whitney, Hood, Shasta and Lyell, are other cabins, none of them more than the merest camps for a night, where the hero of science made his lonely dwelling-place.
“There is something uncontrollable in every man that makes him do the thing he supremely desires, even when his judgment disapproves,” John Muir said once, when asked why he elected to spend some of the best years of his life in places where not even the Indians wandering through the mountains dared venture.
Certainly this something uncontrollable ruled his destiny and compelled him to the pursuit of his supreme desire. He wanted to know something about the marvelous ice formations of the Pacific Coast mountain ranges. So he studied them until Agassiz said of him that “he probably knew more about glaciers than any other man in the world,”
I spent a charming day with Mr. Muir and his family on the Martinez ranch not long ago. The famous mountaineer does not look the hardy, daring, even reckless explorer that he has been. He is of medium height, slender, even delicate, in appearance, with laughing blue eyes and curling hair, now thickly sprinkled with gray. He is a model farmer, and the casual observer might spend a day with him and see only the leisurely, wealthy country gentleman of scholarly taste, with a predilection for scientific study, a little inclined to indolence, perhaps—an inclination which the genial Californian climate fosters in her children. But there is scarcely a perilous, albeit inaccessible, peak of the high Sierras that Mr. Muir has not scaled, carrying no blankets, sleeping in snowy rifts and icy caves, living upon dry bread and the chilly waters of the melting glaciers month after month through long Sierra winters, coming down to the haunts of civilization every year or so for a week at a time, but always hurrying back as soon as possible to his beloved mountains and the glaciers that claimed him for their own.
The Sierra range is about 500 miles long, seventy miles wide and from 7000 to 15,000 feet high. Like all the mountain ranges of California, seen from the plains, they look bare, brown and uninteresting, giving no hint of the mighty forests, the deep, mysterious canyons, the great lakes and rivers bidden away among their vastnesses. Yet all these are there by the thousands, and to Mr. Muir the trails of wolf and mountain sheep and all the teeming wild life of the range are as familiar as Front and East streets are to San Francisco merchants. The great canyons of the range, according to Mr. Muir, have all, without exception, been cut by glacial action, and away up among the peaks glaciers are still at work grading the mountains and making new passes that may yet be highways of traffic along which MacAulay’s intelligent New Zealander may ride in a horseless carriage when he visits California.
“I must get back to the mountains soon,” Mr. Muir said to me, on the day I spent at the ranch. “It would be awful to die down here on the level, I’m not thinking of dying yet, but when I do leave here it must be from the peaks.” It reminded me of something he has somewhere said in print, “These mountain mansions are decent, delightful, even divine places to die in compared with the doleful chambers of civilization.”
“You must have had some narrow escapes, Mr. Muir,” I said, “in your years of climbing icy peaks.” He smiled. “I was climbing Ritter once,” he began, “when, for the only time in my whole life, my nerves failed me. I had been going on all fours for hours and I had no ax to cut my way, I had breakfasted hours before on bread and tea, and was faint and exhausted. It was in the dead of winter. I should never have attempted that trip before midsummer, but I was hungry to get to the top or the north spurs. Ritter is some 13,000 feet high, and surrounded by glaciers and canyons thousands of feet deep. I was up probably 12,000 feet, when suddenly foot and hand hold failed me. There was no going back; there was no going forward. I lay sprawled there on the ice absolutely unable to move, I never expected to get out of that place. I simply hung there and waited until the second should come for me to drop. I suppose it was a sheer slide of 5000 feet once one started.”
I waited breathless for the continuation of the narrative, but apparently the hardy mountaineer thought he had told enough, for alter a long silence he suddenly asked: “Did you ever see a wind storm in the Sierras?” I was forced to answer no. “It is the grandest spectacle God provides for us,” Mr. Muir exclaimed. “I’ve seen Shasta and Whitney and Hood fling out banners miles long to the north wind. When the wind whirls about the peaks it catches up the light, crisp snow and sweeps it away in wonderful, banner-like clouds that are the most glorious things human eye ever saw. The sun shining on them tinges them with gold and crimson and they catch the blue of the sky and the hues of the rainbow flash from the sparkling snow-crystals. They fling out, out, upon the wind until your very soul flees after them, and then you know what it is to be alive!” Mr. Muir is not always in the mood that talks. Years of solitary dwelling in icebound fortresses
Under the morning star,
do not make a man garrulous; but on that long spring afternoon he sat and spun stories that were like tales out of dreamland. He told of climbing for weeks along the course of a glacier—noting its movement, studying its action—carrying on his back a sack of bread, in his pocket some matches and a packet of tea. These were his stores. A little melted snow or ice boiled in a tin cup made his tea, and on this fare he did such work, endured such hardships as fell to the lot of few men. “Bread and books are all a man needs,” he said, as be deftly severed the Joints of a plump, brown turkey at table. “Have some more of the dressing?” and he fell to telling of a Christmas morning be spent on the top of a Sierra ridge, where half a hundred birds flocked about him to share his holiday meal of dry bread and water. “I never carried a gun,” he said, “and I suppose they would not have known one, anyway, but they were tame as house doves. I could gather an audience any morning by whistling. The birds would fly round and round my head, poising on their outstretched wings, and drink in every note.”
I asked him if it was really true, a statement of his I had somewhere seen, to the effect that he had found all wild creatures seeming to possess a curious dislike for the air of “Old Hundred.” “True as preaching,” he cried. “I’ve tried it hundreds of times. I remember once a Douglass squirrel came bothering about camp, and I couldn’t frighten him off. Money couldn’t have hired me to kill the little chap, but he would raid my bread-pack before my very eyes and sit and chatter nonsense at me right over my head. He liked to hear me whistle, and would listen, keeping time with his little red head, as long as I had breath to make a sound. At last I remembered former experiences with birds and small creatures, and I began to whistle ‘Old Hundred.’ Upon my word. I hadn’t reached the second line before that fellow’s heels twinkled in the air, and he was gone like a flash,” and the glacial student chuckled over the memory.
Mr. Muir ‘s thirteen years of close observation of the glacial phenomena have yielded him a vast amount of knowledge regarding the formation of the many lakes and rivers held within the Sierra’s fastnesses. His theories regarding these are original and interesting. According to him every lake in the Sierras is a glacier lake. They have been formed by the slowly melting glaciers. They have disappeared, from time to time, as the great ice-current has receded. Some have met with accidental death, so to speak, beneath avalanches, and the basins of others that will gladden the eyes of explorers centuries hence are now forming beneath mighty glaciers. His discussions on the subject are full of fascinating suggestion. Half the literary industry on Mr. Muir’s part that enabled Thoreau to give the world lasting volumes of record concerning the wood-life about Walden Pond would put us in possession of data of unquestioned value concerning the chain or great mountains he has ranged so freely. He showed me a small mountain—or, at all events, a foothill—of manuscript notes taken during his wanderings, from which he promises one day to make a book, but thus far one small volume of desultory sketches is all the world has profited from his unique explorations.
