220 Life in the Open 



burnt out in places, gaunt and grim, it symbolises the 

 war of eternal ages. Mother Mountains indeed, well 

 named by some mountain lover, as all mountains are 

 the mothers of the land at their feet, and Southern 

 California is the child of its ranges, and the fertile val- 

 leys are the washings of its deepest cafions and loftiest 

 slopes. 



Here is range after range as high as Mount Wash- 

 ington. The Adirondacks, Alleghanies, and all the 

 peaks of New England could be thrown into the maze 

 of cafions of this range, and the addition not be sus- 

 pected. No mountains in America rise so abruptly 

 from their base, none present such an array of deep 

 cafions and precipitous slopes, such long and narrow 

 divides, such stupendous reaches from summit to val- 

 ley. I am familiar with many mountain ranges, but 

 do not recall any such wall, or sudden rise, as that 

 which confronts the pilgrim from the East as he crosses 

 the Colorado or the Mojave desert and ascends to the 

 California divide. He stops near Salton, where at the 

 deepest point the valley is two hundred and eighty feet 

 below the level of the sea, and climbs to the divide 

 nearly a mile above it amid stupendous peaks which 

 tower from ten to eleven thousand feet in air, the heart 

 of the Sierra Madre. 



In strolling through the cafions or on the upland 

 mesas you obtain a glimpse of the life. There are 

 countless birds ; you may see the California condor, as 

 I have in the oak forests of the San Gabriel. The 



