After We Had Sailed About Three Miles Up This Side Fiord, We Came To
What Seemed To Be Its Head,
For trees and rocks swept in a curve
around from one side to the other without showing any opening,
although
The walls of the canyon were seen extending back
indefinitely, one majestic brow beyond the other.
When we were tracing this curve, however, in a leisurely way, in
search of a good landing, we were startled by Captain Tyeen shouting,
"Skookum chuck! Skookum chuck!" (strong water, strong water), and
found our canoe was being swept sideways by a powerful current, the
roar of which we had mistaken for a waterfall. We barely escaped
being carried over a rocky bar on the boiling flood, which, as we
afterwards learned, would have been only a happy shove on our way.
After we had made a landing a little distance back from the brow of
the bar, we climbed the highest rock near the shore to seek a view of
the channel beyond the inflowing tide rapids, to find out whether or
no we could safely venture in. Up over rolling, mossy, bushy,
burnished rock waves we scrambled for an hour or two, which resulted
in a fair view of the deep-blue waters of the fiord stretching on and
on along the feet of the most majestic Yosemite rocks we had yet
seen. This determined our plan of shooting the rapids and exploring
it to its farthest recesses. This novel interruption of the channel
is a bar of exceedingly hard resisting granite, over which the great
glacier that once occupied it swept, without degrading it to the
general level, and over which tide-waters now rush in and out with
the violence of a mountain torrent.
Returning to the canoe, we pushed off, and in a few moments were
racing over the bar with lightning speed through hurrahing waves and
eddies and sheets of foam, our little shell of a boat tossing lightly
as a bubble. Then, rowing across a belt of back-flowing water, we
found ourselves on a smooth mirror reach between granite walls of the
very wildest and most exciting description, surpassing in some ways
those of the far-famed Yosemite Valley.
As we drifted silent and awe-stricken beneath the shadows of the
mighty cliffs, which, in their tremendous height and abruptness,
seemed to overhang at the top, the Indians gazing intently, as if
they, too, were impressed with the strange, awe-inspiring grandeur
that shut them in, one of them at length broke the silence by saying,
"This must be a good place for woodchucks; I hear them calling."
When I asked them, further on, how they thought this gorge was made,
they gave up the question, but offered an opinion as to the formation
of rain and soil. The rain, they said, was produced by the rapid
whirling of the earth by a stout mythical being called Yek. The water
of the ocean was thus thrown up, to descend again in showers, just as
it is thrown off a wet grindstone.
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