In The Town Gardens And
Orchards, Peaches And Apples Fell Upon Glacier-Polished Rocks, And
The Streets Were Graded In Moraine Gravel; And I Observed Scratched
And Grooved Rock Bosses As Unweathered And Telling As Those Of
The High Sierra Of California Eight Thousand Feet Or More Above
Sea-Level.
The Victoria Harbor is plainly glacial in origin, eroded
from the solid; and the rock islets that rise here
And there in it
are unchanged to any appreciable extent by all the waves that have
broken over them since first they came to light toward the close of
the glacial period. The shores also of the harbor are strikingly
grooved and scratched and in every way as glacial in all their
characteristics as those of new-born glacial lakes. That the domain
of the sea is being slowly extended over the land by incessant
wave-action is well known; but in this freshly glaciated region the
shores have been so short a time exposed to wave-action that they are
scarcely at all wasted. The extension of the sea affected by its own
action in post-glacial times is probably less than the millionth part
of that affected by glacial action during the last glacier period.
The direction of the flow of the ice-sheet to which all the main
features of this wonderful region are due was in general southward.
From this quiet little English town I made many short excursions - up
the coast to Nanaimo, to Burrard Inlet, now the terminus of the
Canadian Pacific Railroad, to Puget Sound, up Fraser River to New
Westminster and Yale at the head of navigation, charmed everywhere
with the wild, new-born scenery. The most interesting of these and
the most difficult to leave was the Puget Sound region, famous the
world over for the wonderful forests of gigantic trees about its
shores. It is an arm and many-fingered hand of the sea, reaching
southward from the Straits of Juan de Fuca about a hundred miles into
the heart of one of the noblest coniferous forests on the face of
the globe. All its scenery is wonderful - broad river-like reaches
sweeping in beautiful curves around bays and capes and jutting
promontories, opening here and there into smooth, blue, lake-like
expanses dotted with islands and feathered with tall, spiry
evergreens, their beauty doubled on the bright mirror-water.
Sailing from Victoria, the Olympic Mountains are seen right ahead,
rising in bold relief against the sky, with jagged crests and peaks
from six to eight thousand feet high, - small residual glaciers and
ragged snow-fields beneath them in wide amphitheatres opening down
through the forest-filled valleys. These valleys mark the courses of
the Olympic glaciers at the period of their greatest extension, when
they poured their tribute into that portion of the great northern
ice-sheet that overswept Vancouver Island and filled the strait
between it and the mainland.
On the way up to Olympia, then a hopeful little town situated at the
end of one of the longest fingers of the Sound, one is often reminded
of Lake Tahoe, the scenery of the widest expanses is so lake-like in
the clearness and stillness of the water and the luxuriance of the
surrounding forests. Doubling cape after cape, passing uncounted
islands, new combinations break on the view in endless variety,
sufficient to satisfy the lover of wild beauty through a whole life.
When the clouds come down, blotting out everything, one feels as if
at sea; again lifting a little, some islet may be seen standing
alone with the tops of its trees dipping out of sight in gray misty
fringes; then the ranks of spruce and cedar bounding the water's edge
come to view; and when at length the whole sky is clear the colossal
cone of Mt. Rainier may be seen in spotless white, looking down over
the dark woods from a distance of fifty or sixty miles, but so high
and massive and so sharply outlined, it seems to be just back of a
strip of woods only a few miles wide.
Mt. Rainier, or Tahoma (the Indian name), is the noblest of the
volcanic cones extending from Lassen Butte and Mt. Shasta along
the Cascade Range to Mt. Baker. One of the most telling views of it
hereabouts is obtained near Tacoma. From a bluff back of the town it
was revealed in all its glory, laden with glaciers and snow down to
the forested foothills around its finely curved base. Up to this time
(1879) it had been ascended but once. From observations made on the
summit with a single aneroid barometer, it was estimated to be about
14,500 feet high. Mt. Baker, to the northward, is about 10,700 feet
high, a noble mountain. So also are Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, and
Mt. Hood. The latter, overlooking the town of Portland, is perhaps
the best known. Rainier, about the same height as Shasta, surpasses
them all in massive icy grandeur, - the most majestic solitary
mountain I had ever yet beheld. How eagerly I gazed and longed to
climb it and study its history only the mountaineer may know, but I
was compelled to turn away and bide my time.
The species forming the bulk of the woods here is the Douglas spruce
(Pseudotsuga douglasii), one of the greatest of the western giants.
A specimen that I measured near Olympia was about three hundred feet
in height and twelve feet in diameter four feet above the ground. It
is a widely distributed tree, extending northward through British
Columbia, southward through Oregon and California, and eastward to
the Rocky Mountains. The timber is used for shipbuilding, spars,
piles, and the framework of houses, bridges, etc. In the California
lumber markets it is known as "Oregon pine." In Utah, where it is
common on the Wahsatch Mountains, it is called "red pine." In
California, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, it forms, in
company with the yellow pine, sugar pine, and incense cedar, a pretty
well-defined belt at a height of from three to six thousand feet
above the sea; but it is only in Oregon and Washington, especially
in this Puget Sound region, that it reaches its very grandest
development, - tall, straight, and strong, growing down close to
tidewater.
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