ON THE CRATER OF MOUNT SHASTA. 29 



lis to " The Devil's Garden," which, far from heing sulphurous in 

 tone, is a large terminal moraine stretching eight miles west of 

 the crater; the sides slope at a high angle, and the surface, like 

 that of our kames in the Eastern States, is flat and of even width, 

 being a quarter to half a mile wide. It looked at first like a lava 

 stream, but the angular blocks of hornblende andesite intermin- 

 gled with the debris bespoke its glacial origin. On the south of 

 us ran down from the peak high, steep lateral moraines. 



Passing above the limit of oak trees, we ascend above the belt 

 of pitch pine and silver pines to the region of firs speaking bo- 

 tanically, through the belt of Picea aniahilis and then higher up 

 to P. nohilis and P. contorta, then to a growth of P.flexilis, which 

 attains an elevation of about ten thousand feet. With these, 

 though mostly in the lower belts, were associated the characteris- 

 tic shrubs of California, the Manzanita and Ceanothus, also a yel- 

 low-flowered, stiff plant like greasewood, which ascends far above 

 the limit of trees. The silver-leafed P. contorta, near the upper 

 edge of the timber line, grows from twenty to thirty feet high and 

 from twelve to sixteen inches in diameter, with a very white bark. 

 A zone of firs is situated between it and the highest pines. P. 

 flexilis seems to be only a variety of P. contorta ; it is more or less 

 procumbent, lying down flat, covering yawning chasms or seams 

 in the rough lava, so that one can walk upon the trunks and 

 branches when they bridge the spaces between the angular, 

 jagged blocks of lavas. 



Late in the afternoon we selected a level place near a bank of 

 snow at an elevation of about nine thousand five hundred feet, 

 and, gathering a few logs of dead pines, we made a rousing fire, 

 and at nighfall unrolled our heavy California blankets, sleeping 

 nearer the stars than I ever had before. It was a clear, cold night ; 

 the water froze nearly an inch thick, and at 6.15 the next morning, 

 when we began our ascent of the crater, the thermometer was 

 25 F. 



We rode our horses for an hour until we came to the foot of 

 the ash cone, and by 8.45 were on the summit of the crater. The 

 view in the clear atmosphere was indeed a wide one. Far to the 

 northwest was the Siskiyou range and Pilate's Knob, and to the 

 west the jagged, saw-toothed, snowy peaks of the Salmon Moun- 

 tains ; fifty miles southward was the snow-clad solitary Lassens 

 Peak, twelve thousand feet high ; while Klamath Lakes and the 

 lava beds, the seat of the late Modoc war, lay to the northeast- 

 ward. 



The scene was a wild one within the great crater, whose nar- 

 row edge is formed of sharp, jagged peaks and pinnacles. Broad, 

 almost unbroken snow fields extended from the edge down for a 

 thousand feet ; at the bottom were two frozen lakes like sheets of 



