STUDIES IN THE SIERRA* 



By John Muir 

 NO. VII. — MOUNTAIN-BUILDING 



THIS study of mountain-building refers particularly to that 

 portion of the range embraced between latitudes 36° So and 

 39°, It is about 200 miles long, sixty wide, and attains an elevation 

 along its axis of from 8000 to nearly 15,000 feet above the level of 

 the sea. The individual mountains that are distributed over this 

 vast area, whether the lofty and precipitous alps of the summit, the 

 more beautiful and highly specialized domes and mounts dotted over 

 the undulating flanks, or the huge bosses and angles projecting hori- 

 zontally from the sides of canons and valleys, have all been sculp- 

 tured and brought into relief during the glacial epoch by the direct 

 mechanical action of the ice-sheet, with the individual glaciers into 

 which it afterward separated. Our way to a general understanding 

 of all this has been made clear by previous studies of valley forma- 

 tions — studies of the physical characters of the rocks out of which 

 the mountains under consideration have been made, and of the 

 widely contrasted methods and quantities of glacial and post-glacial 

 denudation. 



Notwithstanding the accessibility and imposing grandeur of the 

 summit alps, they remain almost wholly unexplored. A few nervous 

 raids have been made among them from random points adjacent to 

 trails, and some of the more easily accessible, such as mounts Dana, 

 Lyell, Tyndall, and Whitney, have been ascended, while the vast 

 wilderness of mountains in whose fastnesses the chief tributaries of 

 the San Joaquin and Kings rivers take their rise, have been beheld 

 and mapped from a distance, without any attempt at detail. Their 

 echoes are never stirred even by the hunter's rifle, for there is no 

 game to tempt either Indian or white man as far as the frosty lakes 

 and meadows that lie at their bases, while their avalanche-swept and 

 crevassed glaciers, their labyrinths of yawning gulfs and crumbling 

 precipices, offer dangers that only powerful motives will induce any- 

 one to face. 



* Reprinted from The Overland Monthly of January, 1875. 



