Up San Antonio by the Devil's Backbone is a chapter from
The Southern Sierras of California by Charles Francis Saunders, 1923
Best beloved of all the Sierra Madre peaks is San Antonio, whose ample crown, in shape somewhat like an inverted dish, is the dominating feature of the range. It is the one mountain whose elevation — 10,080 feet above the sea — is sufficient to support a snow cap throughout the winter; and, from December to June in ordinary seasons, the white summit against the blue sky makes from the valley a sight of loveliness, which becomes lovelier when the setting sun entenders it to color of rose. Under the ardors of June the last of the snowy crown melts away save for an occasional patch that lingers a month or so longer in protected hollows, and there is revealed, rising above the dark green cloak of pine and chaparral, a rounded expanse of barren gravel and shake, now pink, now gray, which has gained for the mountain in popular speech the affectionate sobriquet of "Old Baldy." It looks an easy enough back to climb, and if you have anything of the Californian in you, you mark it for the objective of an outing sometime. Should you be in a hurry, you may motor over capital roads by way of the orange groves of Pomona and Ontario to Camp Baldy — Dell's place of the old-timers — a pretty little resort set in the forest at the junction of two brawling mountain brooks, the San Antonio and the Bear, five thousand feet under the summit and the same above the sea; mount a horse for the eight-mile climb by trail to the top; enjoy the view and a mouthful of snow from some sunless cleft of the rocks; and be back at the camp for dinner and a run home under the stars. The Professor and I are old-fashioned, and decided upon doing the thing afoot with knapsacks, taking a week to it.
In the snow-fields of San Antonio several perennial waters have their birth, chief of which is the east or main fork of the San Gabriel, important enough to be classed as a river. We decided to attain the summit by following that stream to its source on the north flank of the mountain; and we chose knapsacks rather than a burro, because of the pack being the lesser evil. By careful selection and the exercise of self-denial a temperate eater can keep the weight of a week's comestibles down to fifteen pounds or so¹, and this, added to a blanket, a skillet, and a few table and toilet accessories, is not so unbearable as to interfere seriously with pleasure, while it makes a man as independent as a turtle with his house upon his back. The burro is a nice animal to read about in your armchair at home, but he is a beast for experts - admirable if you know how to handle him and your temper, but the spring of woes unnumbered if you are green at the business - a creature of unsuspected whims and contrarieties. If you stop to enjoy a view or take a photograph, he likes to walk briskly ahead and, leaving the trail, will artfully entangle his load in the brush, even to the necessity of repacking; if you are in a mood to make time, he loiters exasperatingly, crops every trail-side blade of grass, and must be prodded and belabored till your arm aches. He will refuse to drink at a torrent and manifest a prodigious thirst a mile farther on when there is no prospect of water for a day's journey. Stops for camp must be arranged with view to his provender, concerning which his views may be totally different from yours, and your sleep will be disturbed by thoughts of his getting loose in the night and leaving you stranded. If you have a tender heart, he is forever breaking it with deceitful sighs and groans, one eye the while upon you, as he toils painfully up steeps that, if you were not looking, he would take as nimbly as a goat. He develops real troubles, too; as lacerated knees, or, worst of all, saddle sores. Then the pack - a dozen times a day it slips over the burro's head or under his belly, and must be taken off and laboriously reset. Of all these contingencies the Professor and I thought, and, slinging our knapsacks very contentedly over our shoulders, set blithely forth one foggy morning of early July, encouraged by the cheery remark of a sympathetic young man in the grocery store where we had made a purchase: "I like the fellows that don't mind taking a little hardship for a good time. Driving up to it in your glad rags in a limousine -- shucks, there ain't nothin' to that."
We left the valley at Glendora, a tree-embowered foothill town near the mouth of Big Dalton Cañon. Into this cañada we turned, following a trail which leads across the outer range of the Sierra Madre into the cañon of the San Gabriel's East Fork, through a region which, the autumn before, had been swept by a particularly disastrous fire. An area of about fifty square miles in the east San Gabriel basin had been denuded by the flames, which leaped enclosing ranges and surcharged the air with heat for miles around. Ashes dropped in towns as far distant as Los Angeles, and day after day the sun shone a sullen red ball through a veil of smoke, until rain put an end to what an army of fire-fighters had been powerless to check. And now, less than a year later, it was interesting to see the result of Nature's vis medicatrix on the desolated hillsides. Stripped of their coat of chaparral, drenched by winter rains, and warmed by the unveiled suns of spring, they had borne such a crop of wild bloom as few could remember the equal of. The high tide of it had subsided by July, but enough remained to make our jaunt a feast of flowers. Lupines and phacelias in blue, gilias in pink and white, mentzelias and dicentra in yellow, goldenrod, scarlet larkspur, white convolvulus, purple brodiæa, mariposa tulips of divers hues — all were knit together into one multicolored garment, tenderly covering all scars and making flush times for bees and hummingbirds. It is at such a time one may hope for a sight of the real California poppy — Papaver Californicum — a frail flower with crumpled petals of palest red, soon falling, which is rarely seen except after some desolating fire. The chaparral shrubs — adenostoma, manzanita, rhus, heteromoles, prunus — their dead branches charred and bare to the tip, had sent up from the living roots lusty shoots of new growth two and three feet high, clean, shining, and alert after their bath of fire, the soil of contact with a besmirching world not yet upon them. A cheery sight they made, bodying forth the blessed, unquenchable spirit of renewel and hope that is in nature — Natura, "the forever being born" — which after every calamity sets to undauntedly to build up the waste places, to replace dead ashes with living beauty that was in the beginning. A charming touch in this reconstruction programme was given by the morning-glory vines, which trailed over the ground and twined themselves about the blackened trunks and branches of the burned shrubs, clothing their nakedness with verdure and climbing to the very top and beyond, to fall back in graceful festoons and showers of bright bloom that starred the slopes by the acre. Even more striking was the effect of the widespread colonies of the magnificent scarlet larkspur, as tall as a man, their ample thyrses of brilliant flowers dyeing the distance with warm color in solid sheets. It was a silent, solitary way, yielding us no sign of human life but one: as we lay under an alder tree, listening dozily to the tinkle of a cheerful burnie that sparkled in the cañon's bottom, the music of the waters merged imperceptibly into the hum of a motor, and looking up we saw in darkling flight against the pale sky of noon an aeroplane — one of the Forest Service scouts that patrol the mountains, spying into their secret places for first news of fire. Will it, we wondered, be a more circumspect world, now that the sky has eyes?
It must have been very hot on those flowery hills, for, when we had crossed them and descended into a shady nook where Camp Bonita is snugly set at the junction of the San Gabriel and Cattle Creek Cañons, we were refreshed with a noticeable feeling of coolness, though the thermometer on the shady side of a tree marked 94° and was moving steadily upward. A pleasant memory is Camp Bonita, with its clustered cabins and tent-houses in the shade of great trees, two tumbling trout streams, embroidered with bubbles and flecks of foam, brawling by. Moreover, there was a good cook in the kitchen, and the crowning feature of the meal set before us was a chocolate pie of opulent proportions and ample filling. We shared it with a young man who followed the maker with adoring eyes as she came and went. "That lady," he confided to us — "that lady can't only cook. She can drive a team, pack a burro, catch fish, make garden, and is a real mother to the mountain men. She's all woman, believe me."
The man that day in charge of the camp was one of those well-intentioned marplots who tempt the traveler the world over, by insisting on changing his plans for him. Upon outlining our modest itinerary to him, though it was none of his affair, he must turn it topsy-turvy. "What you want to do is this," he dogmatized, throwing one leg comfortably over the arm of his chair and blowing a cloud of tobacco smoke heavenward. Then he launched out into a programme that included fresh vegetables at one place, and at another trout so greedy and silly that we could catch them with a pin hook; a marvelous waterfall somewhere else, and so on until the rains of autumn should begin. We listened, paid our reckoning, and proceeded with our original plan. Above Camp Bonita the cañon of the East Fork narrows to a wild gorge, where the river, crowded first against one vertical cliff and then against that across the way, hurries tortuously and noisily, now spouting upward in sparkling fountains as it dashes against some boulder bigger than the rest, now slipping in sleek falls or pouring in ouzel-haunted cascades over granite ledges. Scant room is left for the foot passenger, who is continually crowded from the gravelly, stone-cluttered margin into the water. Indeed, he can only foot it during the dry season, for in time of rains the river becomes an irresistible torrent of roaring, passionate water filling the chasm from side to side, except where this yawns out, as it occasionally does, into a wide flat. Such trail as exists is alternately on one bank and the other, and many times in a mile you must either ford or cross on a foot-log. This latter is ticklish business, and nothing is easier than to miss your footing and plunge into the current swiftly swirling beneath you.
Travel in the Upper San Gabriel is never heavy — principally anglers who are indifferent to wet legs and a few miners who are the region's permanent population. Now and then we would come upon one of the latter's cabins, usually set beside a tree in one of those sunny flats into which the cañon occasionally widens. The occupant of one sat in his door — a small, bushy-browed man of perhaps seventy, and we stopped to pass the time of day with him, hoping to learn somewhat of life as it looks through the miners' eyes. His interest centered in placer gold, but temperately — for in winter high water made work impossible and in summer many days were too hot. It brought twenty dollars an ounce if he sent it to the mint, but the dealers in Los Angeles only paid seventeen and skimped the weight, thieves that they were. How did he keep in touch with the world? Well, any of the boys coming up the river in summer would bring his mail or a newspaper, and in winter he didn't touch. Yes, he liked to read if it was true, like newspapers, but no story-books for him, they were just a pack of lies. Lonesome? Bless you, no; too much company sometimes, claim-jumpers — a dirty lot, believe him, they take a chance of getting their heads blown off. He had had to run one off the claim not long before at the point of a gun. He had some regular visitors, though — a pair of wrens. They came in at his window at supper-time and picked crumbs from his table, kind o' cute like. Once he had had a cat, which he had patiently taught to respect the wrens' rights; but something had got her eventually, a coyote, perhaps, or a cougar. His only visitor on four legs now was a squirrel, which he had taught to hunt for baynuts in his pocket. From a shady spring gushing from beneath a huge rock, he dipped a pail cool, sweet water and set it before us — the finest in California, he averred, which was no idle brag, he would have us know, for he had lived in every county of the State except Alpine. As we sat about the bucket, three tippling teetotalers dipping and drinking, and dipping again, the leaves of sheltering live-oaks whispering overhead and the river purring by us, I fancy we must have made an Arcadian scene; and the old man fell to gossiping of old times in the cañon.
"Mebbe you don't know it, but once there were mighty good placers in these mountains," he said; "not so much about here as lower down below Bonita; only there wasn't any Bonita in them days — that's come since. When they struck gold in the Kern River country in the 1850's, the crowd in the north started down there, and when Kern pinched out, as it did pretty pronto, some of 'em just naturally drifted down here, and there was real live times in the San Gabriel diggings for several years. Did you ever here of Eldoradoville? No, of course not; you'd have to be an old-timer to have heard of that. I had the story of it from some of the old boys, and it was a burg all right — a regular little old up-to-date mining town on the San Gabriel just below the Forks, not fifteen miles from here. What do you think of that — a town in the heart of these mountains and now not a chimney left? There was three stores, a bunch of saloons, a stage-line from Los Angeles, political meetings, poker, dances, and everything. Well, sir, everything was lovely for a time, and then in December, I think it was, 1859, there came a tremendous rain, and it poured like the sky roof had caved in. The water in the Forks rose and rose and kept rising, and all records of high water were broken. In a night, as the old-timers used to say, Eldoradoville changed from a mountain town to a seaport, with a clear channel to the Pacific Ocean. Well, sir, she wasn't built for that, and, by George, out she went to the sea — the whole shebang — houses, saloons, Long Toms, sluices, wingdams, cofferdams, and, you bet, a lot of damns with an n in them from those cleaned-out miners; and, say, it never stopped till it brought up in San Pedro harbor, forty miles away. It sure was discouragin'. Some of the old boys kept on panning gold there for several years after that, but I guess the civic spirit all went out with the flood, for I never heard of Eldoradoville starting up again."
"You've entertained us very agreeably," remarked the Professor, as we took our leave, "and I'd like to give you this" — slipping a small book into the miner's grimy hand. "You like reading that is truthful, and I'll guarantee this tells no lie."
My curiosity was excited by the little transaction, and when we were out of earshot I asked what the book was.
"The Gospel according to Saint John," he replied.
Now and then one of these solitaries of the cañon varies the monotony of his hermit life by maintaining a little vegetable garden, watering it by a diversion ditch from some brook that is a tributary of the river. One such we found at the junction of the Iron Fork with the main stream, Iron Mountain looking shaggily down upon the neat rows of beans, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, strawberries, and what not, bordered by fig trees and peach, and several cozy tiers of white beehives. It was an unexpected touch of hominess in the wilderness, the accomplishment of one "Hickory," otherwise "Whiskers," a tall, unkempt man and taciturn, clad in dangling overalls and an abounding beard, whom we found loitering in the dappled sunshine of his truck-patch and directing some irrigation with the tip of a hoe — an occupation, by the way, that might class with angling as the contemplative man's recreation. The fires of the previous autumn had reached almost to his holdings, but, in spite of that threat to his property, his view on fire was radically at variance with those of the Forest Service. "They're a good thing," he said, "clearing out the brush and freshening up the feed, and that's worth while, I'll have you know, when you have a string of hungry burros on your hands." For a trifle he dug us some potatoes and carrots to enliven our dinner; and with a certain old-fashioned courtesy bore us company to the edge of his property, where he set us on our proper trail with a "So-long, boys, good luck, and be good."
On the maps this junction of the Iron Fork of the San Gabriel with the larger stream is marked Trogden's, for here, until death recently took him off, one Trogden of convivial memory kept an anglers' headquarters, mined a bit, and laid the foundations of that garden which we found luxuriating under "Hickory's" care. It was from old Trogden that I learned the true method of eating a trout, which is this: Hold the head of the fish between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and the tail between the forefinger and thumb of the other, and bite liberally into the body of the fish as you would into an ear of corn; then, the last sweet morsel consumed, toss away the naked bone as you would the corncob, and reach out for another fish. Could any way be neater or more thorough?
In all the Sierra Madre there is no wilder spot, I think, than this region about Trogden's. To the west an overland trail leads deviously across the mountains through chaparral and belts of woodland to Bichota Cañon, and that way into the cañon of the North Fork, a way of magnificent vistas; southward a mile, and you look dizzily down into the deep, naked chasm of the San Gabriel Narrows, where the river, reduced by distance to a thread, squeezes and fights its way between crowding granite walls out of shadow into sunlight; eastward, and a mile above the mouth of the Iron Fork, the river is joined by Fish Fork, where, they tell you, the veriest novice may catch a supper of trout with no better outfit than an alder pole and a bait of helgamite picked from under a damp stone. A narrow, steepish cañon is that of Fish Fork, down which the stream leaps by a succession of waterfalls born in springs high up on Old Baldy's shoulders. An old trail used to go that way to the peak, and that remains a fine adventure for the hardy and experienced, but it is no job for amateurs. For them the better plan is to fare northward up the river as the Professor and I went, our amphibian traveling now over and our feet set in a trail of sun-warmed grit, which soon brought a comforting dryness to our water-soaked shoes. And by and by we came to an elbow of the stream where quite suddenly its north-and-south course turned easterly, and we were in the lovely, unspoiled forest of the Prairie Fork, with North Baldy — Old Baldy's lesser brother — looking down upon us. This peak is a scant seven hundred feet lower than Old Baldy, from which it is distant about nine miles in an airline, and is marked by a similar bald, rounded crown cracked and scarred in summer with dry gulches which in winter are streaks of snow. It is the dominating feature of the cañon of the Prairie Fork, stationed at its western end like a materialized god Terminus.
Prairie Fork gets its name, we may take it, from the numerous small natural glades that grace its borders — sunny openings in the prevailing forest of pine, big-cone spruce, and oak, carpeted with wild flowers and grasses, with blue gilias, white evening primroses, thistle poppies crêpy-petaled enclosing hearts of gold, and thickets of wild rose, yerba santa, and clambering clematis. Everywhere, even in the shade of trees, Whipple's yucca lifted magnificent spires of creamy bloom against the darkling background of the woods. We were now at an elevation of about six thousand feet. The valley country which we had left a few days before had been brown and out of flower, but up here the year, though more than half spent by the calendar, still had spring in its keeping, and mariposa tulips bloomed side by side with goldenrod. Through grove after grove we passed of stately pines, mingled with cañon live-oaks and Kellogg oaks, our feet treading noiselessly on a springy carpet of brown leaves and disintegrated litter, generations deep. The narrow valley, walled by mountains rising sharply, presented that aspect so characteristic of the southern sierras, the northward-facing slope garmented in the rich green of coniferous trees (in this case an untouched forest of big-cone spruce), and the south slope pallider with chaparral and xerophytic growths. A fine, peaceful solitude, enveloping us in a sense of remoteness from the world of industry; yet, as we knew, the encompassing heights looked down on miles of laden orchards and fruitful fields, fed by our little river and its affluents. This, as we ascended, grew narrower and narrower, until we could leap it dry-shod, and finally we parted company with it under Pine Mountain — a northern spur of Old Baldy known to the older mountaineers as "Little Baldy" — whence it came foaming like a millrace down a narrow alley of tall alders that locked arms above it.
Somewhat short of that, it must have been, that we came upon an unlooked-for sign of humanity — a roof or two appearing out of the brush ahead of us. Soon we stepped into a clearing where scattered about were the decaying buildings of an ancient gold mine — the Native Son — long since abandoned. Evidently it had once been the scene of much activity, but now its sagging timbers were rotting, its stamps were gnawed by rust. and its boilers had become the lounging-place of dozy lizards.Here we found the tracks of a wagon road coming in from the east, connecting this wilderness where wealth was dug up with the cities of the plain where it was spent. It had been many a day since wheels had passed over the road, and Nature had trespassed upon it after her own fashion, until it was now a mere trail all but lost in a riotous growth of wild flowers and scrub. Pushing our way through this, we were greeted by a surprising sight — an assemblage of small trees whose foliage suggested fig leaves, but smaller, and covered with large yellow flowers so that each little tree seemed enveloped in cloth of gold. These were Fremontias, a tree named by Dr. John Torrey for Frémont, the picturesque character who discovered it growing on the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1842. To the good Doctor, going over the dried spoil of the expedition in the quiet of his herbarium, it was a notable find, interesting, not only because it was the first representative of a new genus, but because of its obvious kinship to the famous and remarkable hand-tree of Mexico.
The subject of plant names was an interesting one to the Professor. As we jogged along our talk often turned upon it, and we were agreed in pronouncing a humanizing sort of practice for scientists to attach personal names to their findings as in this case of the Fremontia. If, as some one has maintained, a garden is the purest of pleasures, to have one's name linked to a plant in Nature's wild garden is to be inducted into a choice hierarchy — and to be insured a fame of rare sweetness and of rare endurance, too. Who can say but that all that our thirtieth-century descendants will know of the great founder of modern botany, Papa Linnæus, will be that fragment of his identity which persists in the name of the twin-flowered Linnæa? — that dainty darling of which, please God, children and men and women of childlike heart will soon be loving and plucking in summer woods the whole world round. Certainly our knowledge now is as scanty of one Genitus who, they say, was sometime King of Illyria; but with each returning autumn his name is revived upon our tongues and will be, it is safe to say, till gentians shall be no more upon the earth.
So here is a special pleasure of the trail, I think, this reviving of biography in living plants of the wayside. It appeals to me as a sort of Old Mortality rôle, more cheerful than cleaning moss from ancient mortuary records cut in stone. Among the trees of this Prairie Fork there was another that held for the Professor a pleasant association — the Kellogg oak, which keeps alive the memory of a kindly old Forty-Niner, Dr. Albert Kellogg. It is the black oak of the woodsmen, Quercus Kelloggii of some botanists, or Quercus Californica of others — a sturdy tree of graceful habit, often fifty or sixty feet high with a trunk diameter of a yard or so, the bark noticeably dark, even black, and, on the older parts of the trunk, deeply cut into small checkers. It is of such distinct character that among all the trees of the Pacific coast forests none, perhaps, is more easily identified by the novice. The deep-lobed leaves, each tipped with one or more bristles, are deciduous, and one of the spring glories of those woodlands of which the Kellogg oak is a considerable part is the opening of its leaf-buds. Then the crowns of these trees take on an appearance that is little short of other-worldly — enhaloed in delicate tones of pink and yellow as tender as the dawn. Dr. Jepson, in his "Flora of California," says that next to the cañon live-oak, the Kellogg oak is the most widely distributed of all oaks in the state. In the south it affects only the higher ranges, usually consorting with yellow pines, as here on the Prarie Fork, where we noticed it first at about six thousand feet above the sea. John Muir somewhere speaks of the nutpine groves as the "bountiful orchards" of the redman, but the expression applies equally well to the groves of this oak, whose acorns have from time immemorial been a highly prized food source by many tribes of California Indians.
To return to the man whom it commemorates, back in the 1850's he was one of seven who met one evening in a shabby room in San Francisco "to found, by the dim light of candles, which they had brought in their pockets, the California Academy of Sciences." While the world about him was feverishly scrambling for gold, he worked steadfastly and with joyousness till the end of his days, thirty-four years later, upon the task of bringing to light the botanical riches of the State. In those pioneer times a California plant student was virtually marooned, without books or herbarium to guide him in the identification of the novel flowers he was continually encountering. Under such circumstances Kellogg naturally got into the way of naming his discoveries himself, and published at various times some two hundred and fifteen species, which time has shown to be at least one hundred and fifty more than were valid. He was a man of childlike and imaginative nature, never happier than when tramping the hills in quest of plants, or, when seat later at home in shirt-sleeves and red-backed waistcoat, a corncob pipe in his mouth, he made painstaking drawings of his finds. His papers on botanical subjects, published in Hutchings' "California Magazine" and other periodicals of the day, possess a certain quaint charm of style, and are marked by many a side excursion into philosophy, altogether disapproved of by the more disciplined scientists. His portrait, which I ran across the other day in a San Francisco biological journal of some thirty years ago, shows the deep set, luminous eyes of a mystic, and one is not surprised that even in his scientific descriptions he was fond of noting what he believed to be correspondences between the material world and the spiritual. He was, indeed, a devotee of Swedenborg, and delighted in the study of the Scriptures and their interpretation by that seer. Born in Connecticut in 1813, he was obliged by a weakness of his lungs while still a young man to seek the milder climate of the South, where he practiced medicine for several years; but, as he never was known to present a bill for his services, he grew poorer and poorer until he had to look about for other means of livelihood. A chance meeting with Audubon, who engaged him as companion on a scientific trip, proved a turning point in his life and shaped his future. In 1849 an invitation from some gold-seekers to go with them to California gave him the chance he needed to reach the Pacific coast, which was accomplished in a schooner by way of Cape Horn.
The cañon of the Prairie Fork heads in a sort of rincon at the foot of a steep ridge cut by five gulches spreading like fingers of a hand. Along one of these the trail leads upward past a spring that gushes from beneath a clump of willows and goes bickering between spongy banks flowery with lupine, helenium, paintbrush, columbine, meadow rue, and scarlet mimilus. It was in such a situation, though not in these mountains, but in the San Bernardinos, that Dr. C. C. Parry, in 1876, discovered the lily that bears his name — a graceful beauty with drooping bells of pale yellow sparingly flecked with purple and shedding an exquisite fragrance. We found it later by another spring on the approach to Old Baldy. Do you ever stop to consider this miracle of fragrance? Unseen itself, prodigally issuing out of the unseen, and continually as prodigally replenished, it is like the oil of the widow of Sarepta's inexhaustible cruse, and no less a miracle because daily occurring under our noses. What more can be said of it than that it is out of the one divine storehouse of those unseen things that are eternal?
From the head of Prairie Fork there is a choice of routes to the summit of Mount San Antonio. One is up the north slope of that Pine Mountain, already mentioned, a spur of the main peak, and connected with the latter by a ridge, rough, but traversable. In the absence of a dependable trail, one must make one's way as it develops — an interesting business for the hardy climber. For the less venturesome a better plan is to follow the old wagon trail over the ridge into the north fork of Lytle Creek, and descending this you come by and by to Coldwater Cañon. Turning into this, the Professor and I found a capital trail, by which we climbed to ever-lovelier outlooks and groves of nobler trees until we stood upon the crest of a divide that looked down into San Antonio Cañon. The sun was just setting, and, looking upward across the bristling tops of a tamarack forest that loosely clothed the slope, we could see the bare crown of the mountain of our quest, mellow and benignant in the evening light and gathering mists. It was our first sight of it since leaving the valley and after walking almost entirely around it for a week treading on its toes and sleeping on its flanks. A woman sat beside the trail that led down the mountain, and occasionally geve vent to a shrill halloo, which was answered faintly from the upper wood. In a little while two boys came bounding from above — one with an amazing, blood-stained face from a case of nose-bleed. They were a highly excited little couple over the successful outcome of their climb to the peak, and after inquiring of us the time of day they set off briskly down the cañon with the woman, who was evidently their mother. It was a pleasant music in that solitude of the high mountain — their cheerful, boyish clack, growing fainter and fainter until the cañon depths swalloed both them and their talk.
Old Baldy's summit even in midsummer is a bleak place to pass the night, and we decided to postpone further progress toward the peak till the morrow. Looking about us for a camping-ground sheltered enough to escape the winds, which at all seasons draw searchingly across these upper reaches of the mountain, we sighted through a vista of the trees a log cabin snugly set against a shaly bank in the shadow of lofty pines. There was no evidence of life about, but an unlatched door we accepted as an invitation to make ourselves at home. There were two rooms, in one of which were two rough beds and a cookstove, and in the other a home-made table and stools. A clutter of pack saddles and miner's tools filled the corners. On the table and fastened down with a nail driven through it was a sheet of paper on which was a penciled note addressed to the cabin owner, expressing regret at the latter's absence from home. The signer was evidently not an intimate friend , for he explained his identity by a parenthetical "I'm the man whose wife lost her hatpin." On the stove lay another note from a chance caller signed by the "man who rode out of the mountains with you." Obviously it was quite the thing to look in on this lone inhabitant of the heights, even if you did not know him very well; so we ventured to take advantage of the mute welcome of the open door and turned in for the night, glad to escape the discomfort of a bivouac on the ground at that chill altitude. In the morning the Professor composed on a leaf of his notebook a suitable acknowledgment of indebtedness to our absentee host and, departing, we left it, too, nailed to the table.
The morning star was just fading when we stepped out of the door and doused our heads in icy water brought up from a tiny spring caught in a dimple of a near-by cañon-side. By the time we had breakfasted and were footing it up the summitward slope, the sun had risen, and the shadows of the tree trunks barred the the floor of the thin, open forest through which our trail went winding. Almost immediately we began to see glimpses of the desert; little by little these widened until, at the foot of the Devil's Backbone, the view became an almost unobstructed panorama. North and east lay the Mojave Desert, its native harshness transmuted into tender beauty by that distance which lends enchantment, shimmering in the sunlight from the Sierra Nevada to Arizona. We thought we could localize both Mount Whitney's top, one hundred and fifty miles to the north, that highest land in the United States outside of Alaska, and Death Valley, the lowest, eighty-eight miles to the right of it — an interesting instance of one extreme at the foot of another. As to San Gorgonio and San Jacinto, nearer at hand, there was no doubt — plum-purple islands at rest on lakes of white vapor, their crests silhouetted against the morning light. All the coast country to the south was a monster fog bank, upon whose undulations the sun shone as upon a polar sea, with here and there some mountain peak, higher than the rest, thrust up to the light.
Though the Professor and I had treated the subject of the passage of Devil's Backbone with outward nonchalance when we spoke of it in advance, the fact is we were both secretly very uneasy at the prospect of that dizzy business. The forest ranger from whom we had got our fire permit had remarked, "Oh, yes, you can do it all right, but mind your eye or you'll get a bad fall." Non-professionals, commenting on our programme, had not minced matters; for instance, "Gosh, boys, it's just like a knife's edge; drops off both sides plumb straight to nowhere and nothing to catch onto if you drop. To be sure, the worst of it isn't more than a couple of hundred feet or such a matter, but there's a quarter of a mile, all told, bad enough. Last time I was over it, the man with me got down on all fours and crept, and then his nose began to bleed and I just naturally had to carry him. It's the devil's own, all right."
So with all these alarming recollections cropping up, we made an excuse of those comfortable, stable views of the lower country to dilly-dally long and fondly over them. At last, tightening our packs, we stepped gingerly out upon the dreaded ridge — to find that, after all, it was no worse than several ticklish bits we had negotiated elsewhere. The shaly crest along which the trail crept like a scratch was narrow enough in all conscience — indeed, hardly more than the width of our two feet — but it fell away less dizzily than we had been given to expect and we must have stumbled egregiously to have gone off. In fact, once we were relieved of our apprehensions, we found exhilaration in this sort of airy travel. It was like walking some bridge of the gods, so uplifted above the earth was it, so sweet and buoyant the air that drew across it, so remote seemed the world and the things that are of the world. And it was a bridge that led us into quite a new land, treeless save for an occasional flattened tamarack or lowly clump of chinquapin, and rising easily by barren, gravelly undulation flecked with lingering snow-banks here and there, until we came out upon a wide, wind-swept expanse of shale and broken rock — a desert on a mountain peak. This was the summit. In chinks of the gravel a scattering of brave little stunted flowers held life by the skirts — eriogonum, alumroot, draba, a dwarfish currant or two, and one small blue violet — a rather noteworthy find, this last, as violets in California are more often yellow than blue. Here we found a cairn with a post implanted in it; and affixed to the post a metal plate, recording the elevation, confessed itself the work of the San Antonio Club, whose business, we took it, was to set its feet periodically on this highest land west of the San Bernardino Range — a worthy enough business, too, that of inducting lowlanders into purer airs and wider views.
A trail to Camp Baldy leads down the south side of the mountain. It was noon when we started down it. At four o'clock we were doing twenty miles an hour in an auto-stage out of the San Antonio Cañon, bound for Ontario and the train home.
¹ For instance, one package two-minute oat food; one package seedless raisins; one can choclat-achor (a powdered instant chocolate made from the whole bean); two small cans salmon; one can powdered milk; two pounds dried apricots, peaches or prunes; one pound English walnuts (hulled); one pound cheese; one package egg noodles, rice or corn meal; four small cans beans; a pound or two of hard crackers (a multi-grain sort called Grant's is excellent); a tin of tea; sugar; salt. If the German meal sausages of pre-war days come again, let some of them be included. This bill of fare may be regarded as Spartan or Sybaritic' according to the point of view. At any rate, it will keep you going; particularly if you start the day on oat-food well mixed with raisins and a dash of milk added — a most nutritious and palatable ration. Of course, if you are clever enough to catch trout as you travel, your pack may be correspondingly reduced and your fare enlivened.
Up San Antonio by the Devil's Backbone
Perhaps. But they've apparently got more smarts than a Taco, a Turtle, and a Sweetstacks combined:Zach wrote:geez, they were very wordy back then.
PackerGreg wrote:In all the Sierra Madre there is no wilder spot, I think, than this region ... a mile above the mouth of the Iron Fork, the river is joined by Fish Fork ... A narrow, steepish cañon is that of Fish Fork, down which the stream leaps by a succession of waterfalls ... that remains a fine adventure for the hardy and experienced, but it is no job for amateurs.
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cougarmagic
- Posts: 1409
- Joined: Wed May 07, 2008 5:21 pm
turtle wrote: ↑Perhaps. But they've apparently got more smarts than a Taco, a Turtle, and a Sweetstacks combined:Zach wrote:geez, they were very wordy back then.
PackerGreg wrote:In all the Sierra Madre there is no wilder spot, I think, than this region ... a mile above the mouth of the Iron Fork, the river is joined by Fish Fork ... A narrow, steepish cañon is that of Fish Fork, down which the stream leaps by a succession of waterfalls ... that remains a fine adventure for the hardy and experienced, but it is no job for amateurs.
yeah, but you cut out the
a trail in Fish Fork eh? must be an easy canyonAn old trail used to go that way to the peak
The professor needed a better map 
I would have thought even back then, there are some easy errors to point out. I threw a box on the map where the dude was writing from, so you can see how he thought to get to Bichota all he had to do was follow the trail west...errr..no.
I would have thought even back then, there are some easy errors to point out. I threw a box on the map where the dude was writing from, so you can see how he thought to get to Bichota all he had to do was follow the trail west...errr..no.-
mcphersonm80
- Posts: 243
- Joined: Mon Aug 23, 2010 11:46 am
Wow, that's one of the wordiest, most awesome things I've ever read. 
Any idea where to get the book?
Any idea where to get the book?
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PackerGreg
- Posts: 623
- Joined: Sat Sep 12, 2009 9:31 pm
Amazon shows some copies available: http://www.amazon.com/SOUTHERN-SIERRAS- ... 835&sr=1-7
Must be akin to some of the bloviators on other forums 
Still kinda cool you found this old bit of historical factoid.Hold the head of the fish between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and the tail between the forefinger and thumb of the other, and bite liberally into the body of the fish as you would into an ear of corn; then, the last sweet morsel consumed, toss away the naked bone as you would the corncob, and reach out for another fish.