The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, November 10, 1901, Page 20

18 THE SUNDAY CALL. WA SELDOM BEEN. OVER SNOW SEVEN FEET DEEP AND THEN DOWN | TO THE MAMMOTH POOL OF THE SAN JOAQUIN RIVER. ' ADVENTURES, OF SERIOUS ASPECT BUT- HAPPY ENDING. { HARD WORK ON THE ROAD, FUN IN CAMP AND A | GOLD MINE FOUND BY ACCIDENT. A SURVEYING TRIP WHERE THE FOOT OF MAN HAS e + % ERN and Kinge river canyons, the The pack animals, ten in number, were Merced, contalning the Yosemite all supposed to”be agreeablp to the ar- Valley, the Tuolumne with s rangements, but Pete, one of the mules, beautiful Hetch Hetchy valley, objected most decidedly to being saddled. econd only to the Yosemite, have The moment any efforts were made to &ll beer ted and more or less Well blanket him his heels were In the alr and written up; but of the upper San Joaquin for a time it looked as though his wishes river canyon, lying in the center of the in the matter would have to be respected, four above mentioned, little If anything has appeared in print, hence in writing of a trip in that section of the Sierras I feel m writing of a comparatively little wn district, arting from Fresno in May, by team, Bell's ranch, thirty-five miles northeaster- ly and quite a distance up in the Sierras, was reached the second day. Here the pack train was to be outfitted, but as ar- rengements had been made in advance end supplies brought up from Fresno it ‘was on matter of & couple of days be- fore the pack saddles, kayaks and camp paraphernalia were in order for the start on & long and hard trip, but finally after repeated efforts his ob- Jections were overcome and In the end, is when we were at the end of the v, Pete proved a good pack animal, Finally a start was made, and when the party, eleven men all told, with ten pack animels, were strung out on the trafl winding up the mountain, with some of the animals almost lost under their large packs, they made quite an imposing sight. Our first cemp was in Hosea basin and right good did the bacon and beans taste that night after the long and hard trip up the mountain. On the second day while the pack train went ahead to make camp &t Big Cresk three of us made & t ONE oF THE FALLS OF Bl& <REEK 22k i detvur, going up & mountain to the great sawmill of the Fresno Flume and Irriga- tion Company at Shaver. Here were to be seen those immense sugar and yellow pines and cedars cut down by the score, the logs drawn down greased skidways by cables, one or two miles In length, drawn by immense stationary “bull” en- gines, to a reservolr, there to be floated to the mill, cut up into lumber and sent down a large V shaped flume, filled with water, sixty miles or more and 5000 feet lower in elevation, to the rallroad at Clovis. d To go down this flume in a boat is & most exhilarating ride, the scenery grand as one goes around high cliffs and ridges, but véry dangerous and not often under- taken. 2 The following morning aftér some mem- bers of the party had negotiated for all the stone mortars, baskets and the like at a nearby rancheria and which was the last babitation we saw, we inquired of THE MERMIT MEAR HEAD WATERS OF 'SAN JOAQVIN RIVER, ~ TSNP the Indians the whereabouts of the trail we should take and to each inquiry as to whether it ran north, south, east or west we recelved the assuring reply of '‘y an Indian’'s answer, we discovered, to any question he does not understand. Other questions recefved the same reply, but when we pointed in a certain direction up a mountain whefe we had been told was a new trail and the yes came so decidedly we concluded to try it, but a long and tire- some search through brush resulted in the conviction that the new trail was a myth and that the Indlans’ ‘‘yes gain meant, I do not know. So we took an old trail Igading in another direction, but the high- up we climbed the steeper/the trail be- came, till at about 1000 feet up it really looked doubtful if the packs on the ani- mals would not prove too heavy and over- turn the brutes. It was only a few mo- ments before Pete and his pack fell over and rolled 100 feet down an almost pre- cipitous slide to its tovts e THE PARTY PACK TRALIN 5T THE ENP OF TR.P We all thought that would surely mark ‘Pete's last resting place as it had that of several animals before, numerous skele- tons attesting to that fact; but upon, be- Ing relleved of his pack, Pete was up in & mement, a little bit dazed, to be sure, but, barring a few scratches, was soon ready to go on. The pack train had hard- ly started, however, befors another ani- mal lost its balance and went rolling down nearly as far as Pete had, but he, too, had a miraculous escape from being killed. All the while we had been on this trail a sheep herder a £ mile off was heard calling, ‘‘come back, come back, come back,” with & few oaths inter- spersed, but as his dog was continually barking at the sheep, we supposed he ‘was calling it, and only learned a few ‘weeks later he was endeavoring to have us come and take the regular stock trail, the one we were on being used only by the Indians when afoot. The following day, after crossing the rummit of Kiser Ridge at an elevation of 7500 feet, and over snow seven feet in depth, we descended to the Mammoth pool of the San Joaquin River 4000 feet below, and through which all the water from the immense drainage area of over one thousand square miles of the head- waters of the San Joaquin River passes. Nothing could be grander than the sur- rounding scenery, Mount Lyell, the Min- arets and all the high Sierras appar- ently close at hand, completely covered with deep snow and some living glaciers, while almost all of the surrounding coun- try was clothed with grand forests of pine and cedar timber. Here is the home of the deer. In one area of a few square miles their tracks were "almost as numerous as would be made by a band of sheep; but to get into the country means a long and difficult trip, once there, however, game and trout can be had in abundance, but it ‘would be entirely too slow work for one to fish alone, as I have seen trout, and good-sized ones, too, caught as fast as one could cast a line and another unhook the fish. Bear are plentiful also, as we saw nu- merous evidences of their presence. And now for a bear story: On a Sunday afternoon while in camp high up in the mountains a most peculiar sound was heard a quarter of a mile or so0 off. Elich person gave his opinion as to what It might be. One thought it was made by a large bird, as he had hedrd several years ago a large bird making, he thought, a similar sound. Others thought it an animal of some kind, o to make it interesting 1 suggested a bear, which all at once agreed it must be and hasty prep- arations were at once made for the hunt. The rifle was examined and put in order, the magazine loaded full of cartridges and a pocketful taken besides in case the brute had a very tough skin and needed plenty of lead; another armed himself with the best ax the camp afforded, another the big butcher knife and the fourth a pistol; while Major, the dog, was taken to make the attack. As four, with all the imple- ments necessary for a close encounter, seemed a large enough party to capture or kill the unknown beast, whatever it might be, the rest of us r*ulned in camp for developments. ¢ The party went off elated at the thought of killing a real live bear, and as at regu- lar intervals the sound continued, always coming from the same direction, the hunters felt déad sure of their game, but after a lapse of fifteen minutes or so four very much disappointed hunters returned gameless. They reported the game as having flown. The truth of the matter was the sound came from the wind blowing the limbs of two trees together; so after that bear- hunting was a tabooed subject in camp. This reminds me of another-little excite- ment we had. With the exception of a few nights, we never pitched the tents, preferring to slcep on our cots in the open air. So one night about midnight, after all had retired, Major, whe slept near the cots, awakened camp with vocif- erous barking and would not be quieted. One of the party upon arising to see the cause informed us it was no more nor less than that much-dreaded little animal, a pqlecat, and that it was not more than eifht feet from three of us. What was to be done? Major was Inclined to attack it. I knew that would be a fatal mistake, so I grabbea the dog. Then one of the party reached for his rifle and was for shooting it right off, but it he merely maimed it, what a fix we would be in! So he was per- suaded not to shoot: another tried to shoo it off, but the audaclous Ilittle animal would not be shooed. Instead they sald it came nearer, so a match was lit to see which way it really was headed for and one of the party had the satisfaction of geeing both its eyes, and he said they were very- large ones, too. This declded us that it was going to stand its ground, so what to do was the perplexing ques- tion. With Major barking and, several of us yelling, still on it came, slowly, to be sure, but it gave us cold shivers neverthe- less, and we were on the point of desert- Ing camp, when a second match was lit, which revealed the cause of the whole ex- citement to be what? Only a bit of paper. A very prominent feature of the country is Immense domes of granite, generally bell-shaped, flanged at the bottom and ranging in diameter from 50 to nearly 100 feet. ‘It Is one of these that has had much to do with the formation of the Mammoth pool. From the pool the grade line of the pro- posed tunnel water conduit ran down the canyon of the San Joaquin with a fall of seven and a half feet to the mile, while the river had a fall of from 50 to 100 feet in the same distance, so the river kept falling lower and lower from the grade line till at the end of the line, twenty-one wmiles distant, it was 1730 feet below. The survey down this line was an ex- ceedingly difficult one. For much of the distance temporary trails had to be made through dense brush or over cliffs to get to and from our work. One man carried 200 feet of three-quarter-inch rope the en- tire trip, which when a cliff had to be scaled or worked around he would by some means get to a point above and fasten the rope around a tree or rock, while we below would swing around or climb up the otherwise unscalable places. Day after day slmost every steh we made THE PARTY VAND PACK TasIN AT e T START more above accidentally loosenea & bowlder fiftgen inches in diameter. He called out a warning, and just as I looked up the bowlder, with a whiz and a crash, dashed down not three inches above my head, striking the ground at the feet of the two men and then disappearing into the canyon below. At another time, while I was directing three men, standing but a few feet apart and not more than s hundred feet ahead, what brush to cut, a bowlder four feet In diameter came dashing down the steep slope, breaking trees ten inches in dlam- eter as if they were brush, sending rocks fiying in all directions and raising gPeat clouds of dust. That the men, or at least one, must be hit seemed inevitable; they had\not a moment's warning and no chance of escape, and the bowlder was going right for them. It was a moment of great suspense, and only relieved when with a great bang the bowlder struck the bottom of the canyon and was shattered to pieces.. The dust cleared and it was seen that by some miracle no one was even scratched. The bowlder passed so near one of tne men he could have touched it with his hand, and small rocks all but grazed them. But happenings of this kind were of almost daily occur- rence, and if the rocks did mot siide we reversed the programme and siid on the rocks ourselves. The farther down the canyon we went the wilder and more inaccessible it be- came, and there is no doubt that we were pioneers of much of the way. Sud- denly one day we came upon a place where a large bowlder had been recently removed by human hands, but what for and by whom was the perplexing ques- tion, and only solved after a long search revealed in an almost inaccessible place an old-fashioned Mexican arastra for crushing quartz. A little farther on was found a recently and evidently hastily de- serted camp, with provisions and cruds mining tools lying around. Search, as we did most thoroughly every possible loca- tion, we could find no trace of either the mine or any trail such as one would ex- pect to find leading from a mine to an arastra—only single tracks, and they seemed to lead in all directions, so it be- gan to 1dok as though the mine location would remain a mystery. But the last day of our stay in that vicinity, and when we were mioving camp, omne of the men while out hunting accidentally found in a dense brush thicket signs of the long looked for trail. but so well was its en- trance hidden that only an accident would have revealed it. A call brought all of the party at once to the thicket and it took sharp eyes to follow the winding trail, now through brush, now over rocks, up a deep ravine. At last, however, we were rewarded by finding the entrance to the tunnei, and from the large size of the dump at its mouth it was surely a long one. We were soon in it, following its cir- cuitous way till at last we came upon the ledge itself. There was no doubt of that, as its glistening face stood out in the dim light, but just where the ledge commenced a barrier had been placed recently in the form of a large pile of rock, which pre- vented our further progress, but through a small opening at the top we could see by the aid of matches the ledge greatly increasing in width as it disappeared in the depths beyond; but the pack train was already far up the mountain, so we had to reluctantly give up further exploration for some time in the future. This has un- doubtedly furnished a clew to the mys- tery of-a party living In the foothills, who would disappear very frequently and then reappear with plenty of “dust,” and who always was seen going up the mountains in this direction. He was undoubtedly at the mine when we were first in that vi- cinity, but had disappeared, hoping we would not discover his identity or the mine. As an account of a trip such as this would hardly be complete without some reference to rattlesnakes, from the bites of which we almost daily had some very narrow escapes, I will mention the fol- lowing: One of the men, always In for a joke, thought he would enliven camp a little, so he very adroitly colled a piecs of large rope In the blankets of his next camp mate, attaching to the rope a small one, which he covered with leaves, and bro’ghl the end to his own cot. = That evening after all had retired and the vie- tim was in deep, slumber the rope was quietly drawn. Suddenly the victim awakened, and the next instant, realizing there must be a.snake in his bed, jumped up as if a blast had been let off delow and called out in no uncertain voice. The victim recelved much sympathy, but was advised to the rattler at ouce, and armed to the teeth bravely attacked his blanket with clubs and rocks. After as- suring himself that the snake must be dead he threw off the blanket, only to find he had been the victim of a practical Joke. At the end of six weeks we reached our starting point, Bell's ranch, a sorry look- ing party. Our clothes at the beginning had been new or nearly so, but were literally torn oft our backs by the we had had to fight our way nearly the entire time, Still, as returned much bettdr in health i we took our lives in our hands, as a hesi- ° tation of but a moment in around cliffs or over those smooth and treacherous domes would have meant a fall and almost instant death in the can- yon below, while the danger from falling rocks was very great. While and drinking at a little spring on a pre- cipitous slope, with two men standing ‘within three feet of me, another member of the party crossing a hundred feet or A Laborers engaged in excavating for the foundation of & new bullding in street, Ottawa, have located the stone, fraught with so much , which marked the scene nation of the Hon, Thomas McGee, one of the fathers of the ation. Ome surface of the stone ished, and on it was inscribed. 1968 Hore fell D'Arcy McGoa iy i 7t