loveliness the
forest-euthanasia of our Eastern fall appeared until we had crossed the
boundary of Oregon. Shasta Peak is, by the track, nearly eighty miles
from that line. To-day, just as the sun got down to the tree-tops, the
wooded slope suddenly receded from our left, and towered into one of
those noble crags which all over the continent go by the name of "Castle
Rock," but which include no instance more truly deserving the name than
this bold mass of pinnacles and bastions, bare as a Yo-Semite precipice,
which lifted itself apparently about a thousand feet above the green
_glacis_ of the slope, stern and gray at the base, but etherealized
along its crest and battlement by sunset spendors of red and gold.
Simultaneously with the Castle's appearance, our leafy covert parted
before us, and disclosed in level light, which made its snow opalescent,
and bathed its vast, rugged masses of stone and earth in one inclusive
winy glow, the glorious giant of California which had drawn us hither
through the wilderness. The height of Shasta is variously stated. It is
certainly over sixteen thousand feet, and may likely be nearer eighteen
thousand. The last geological survey pronounced it the highest mountain
in the Nevada range,--a statement taking into account Mount Hood and the
other great peaks of the Cascade system, which itself is but an Oregon
reappearance of the Sierra Nevada. The distance from which Hood, Saint
Helen's, and Rainier could be seen with the naked eye led us afterward
to regard this statement with some doubt; but certainly no peak which we
met in all our large experience of the mountains of the continent ever
compared with Shasta in producing the effect of vast height. All the
others which we have seen, with the exception of Lander's Peak, whether
in the Rocky, the Nevada, the Cascade, or the Pacific Coast range, have
suffered, visually, from modulation through their gradually ascending
tiers of foothills, or by the blending of their outlines with the
neighboring peaks. This is especially so with Pike's Peak, which,
despite its being one of the loftiest mountains in America, has its
proportions most dissatisfyingly disguised, in all but a single point of
view, in the _canon_ of the Fontaine-qui-Bouille. Shasta is a mountain
without mediations. It sits on the verge of a plain, broken for a
hundred miles to the northward only by pigmy volcanic cones heaped
around extinct _solfataras_. We approached it in the only