Читать книгу Oregon, the Picturesque. A Book of Rambles in the Oregon Country and in the Wilds of Northern California онлайн

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We saw Tahoe, the gem of the world’s lakes, in its setting of snow-covered, pine-clad mountains. We saw the strange volcanic plains and hills of Lassen and Modoc Counties with their wide, shallow lakes. We saw Eagle Lake, flashing in the sunset like a sheet of molten silver among the pine forests that crowd up to its very shores. We saw the vast mountain cauldron with its lapis-lazuli sheet of water—the bluest bit of water on this mundane sphere—Crater Lake, with its mighty ramparts of unscaled cliffs and the unmatched vista of mountain forests and lake from the newly built government road. We saw the vast forests of Central Oregon, where in a whole day’s run there is little evidence of human habitation. We saw the great mountain range that skirts the plain covered by this forest, with here and there a stupendous peak, white with eternal snow, piercing the azure heavens. We saw the white, cold pyramid of Mount Hood with the dark belt of pines at its base, stand in awful majesty against a wide band of crimson sky. For a hundred miles we followed the vale of the queen river of the west, mountain-guarded Columbia, and coursed over the famous new highway with its unrivalled panoramas of stream and wooded hills. We pursued the western Willamette through its fertile, well-tilled valley and admired the prosperous, up-to-date towns along the way. We traversed the rough, sinuous trails over the summits of the rugged Cascades into the virgin redwoods of Del Norte and Humboldt Counties. For more than a hundred miles the narrow road twists through these giant trees, coming at times to commanding headlands from which there are endless vistas of shining sea. We visited Eureka, the wonder city of the North, long shut in behind ranges of almost impenetrable hills and dependent on the sea alone—though now it has a railroad and lives in hopes of the coming of the new state highway. We saw Shasta of the eternal snows and Lassen’s smoke-shrouded peak. We followed the rugged coastline of Mendocino County with its stern headlands overlooking leagues of glorious ocean. We coursed through the vast vineyards of the Napa and Santa Rosa Valleys with the terraced hill ranges on either hand showing everywhere the careful tillage one sees in Italy or along the Rhine. We crossed the pine-clad hills that shut in beautiful Clear Lake Valley with its giant oaks and crystal sheet of water—which still lingers in our memories as the loveliest spot in all California. We traversed the great plain of the Sacramento, whose pastoral beauty and quiet prosperity rivals that of the Mississippi Valley.