St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1892-08-18

People, and Interestingly Described by
One of Them.
Correspondence of the CALICO MIAMI
Now that you and your readers
(who are not at the sea-shore) are
climbing mountains, you will be in
terested to know what are our facill-
ties for that sport. Four of the St.
Johnsbury colony here, Prof. F. P.
Bracket, and Messrs. Walker, Mel
son and Jones, have just put the
matter to the test,-though | have
robbed Claremont to make out my
four. This place is rightly named
Grown of the Valley" overlooking
as it does that geographical division
called the San Gabriel. But a still
more important fea ture gifts beauty
is the Sierra Madre range of noun
tains which rises behind it and
stretches for sixty miles or SO east
and west. 1t is but six miles to their
base. by smooth and hard road,
from which new trail to the sum-
nit, eight miles long, has been lately
opened, of easy grade, five feet to the
hundred. We chose the old trail for
our ascent, taking cars to Santa
Anita station, six miles, and carriage
a mile or two farther TO Sierra Madre,
where mules received us and assisted
our climb,-two mules for the four,
on the ride and tie plan-up a
shorter but sleeper grade to the same
terminus. We voted this proportion,
half mule piece, to be just right
for getting the most advantage out
of the trip, reducing the fatigue ex-
actly to the point of greatest salub-
rity. We kept the animals over
night and returned by the new trail
next day. Instead of hotel, camp
furnished us accommodations-at
about the altitude of Mt. Lafayette
"a permanent camp of half a dozen
tents and half a dozen buildings,
rudely finished and furnished. The
trails lead on still higher, to Wilson'S
Peak, where stands rude observa-
tory, once provided with a telescope,
an experiment station for testing the
site for astronomical observations.
The result was favorable The brick
pedestal has been dismantled of it's
apparatus, and somewhere in the
vicinity will be placed the great
Harvard telescope which is now be-
ing constructed by Alvan Clark S
sons. Our aneroid gave about $500
feet as the altitude-above Pasadena
about 800. This is the sort OF
rampant which we have behind our
city, rising abruptly from the edge
of the valley to an altitude averag-
ing with Mt. Washington and the
Presidential group, and reaching
1900 to $4,000 in some of its
peaks. One naturally supposes that
the Mojave desert will be seen from
the top. Instead there is an unbrok-
en- wilderness of similar mountains
intervening for ten or twenty miles,
with occasional arabic valleys among
them, but mostly uninhabited if not
uninhabitable. The deep canyons
have here and there small streams
running in them, which dry up as
soon as they emerge into the open
valley, but most of the ravines are
dry. The nearest resemblance to
rivers which we saw were the dry
beds of the Washes" by which the
winter rains that fall over this noun
tain wilderness are drained off to the
sea. All summer they lie, like the
bleached trigs and branches of a
huge dead tree, long, glistening
stripes of great white boulders ano
coarse gravel, in few of them a DROP
of water to be found, covered by E
freshet perhaps not once in twenty
years.
These mountains are singularly
different from most that we know
about elsewhere in that they art
scantily wooded below, and more
heavily timbered higher up. On thu
very top of Mt. Wilson are pine trees
two feet in diameter, groves of them
and large oaks. Indeed the fora is il
general the same with that on tn
lower level, even the deserts. l re
member, for example, the Yucca. ap
propriately called the Spanish Bayo
net from the shape and sharpness o
it's radical leaves, with its taperins
stalk, ten or fifteen feet high (which
saws into such pretty pin cushions)