Southeast the mountain spurs are smoothed into a broad glacis, densely overgrown with chaparral, and ending in open groves around plains of yellow grass.
A little farther begin the wild, cañon-curved piles of green mountains which represent the Sierras, and afar, towering over them, eighty miles away, the lava dome of Lassen’s Peak standing up bold and fine. South, the Sacramento cañon cuts down to unseen depths, its deep trough opening a view of the California plain, a brown, sunny expanse, over which loom in vanishing perspective the coast-range peaks. West of us, and quite around the semi-circle of view, stretches a vast sea of ridges, chains, peaks, and sharp walls of cañons, as wild and tumultuous as an ocean storm. Here and there above the blue billows rise snow-crests and shaggy rock-chains, but the topography is indistinguishable. With difficulty I could trace for a short distance the Klamath cañon course, recognizing Siskiyou peaks, where Professor Brewer and I had been years before; but in that broad area no further unravelling was possible. So high is Shasta, so dominant above the field of view, we looked over it all as upon a great shield which rose gently in all directions to the sky.
Whichever way we turned, the great cone fell off from our feet in dizzying abruptness. We looked down steep slopes of _névé_, on over shattered ice-wreck, where glaciers roll over cliffs, and around the whole, broad, massive base curved deeply through its lava crusts in straight cañons.
These flutings of ancient and grander glaciers are flanked by straight, long moraines, for the most part bare, but reaching down part way into the forest. It is interesting to observe that those on the north and east, by greater massiveness and length, indicate that in former days the glacier distribution was related to the points of compass about as it is now. What volumes of geographical history lay in view! Old mountain uplift; volcanoes built upon the plain of fiery lava; the chill of ice and wearing force of torrent, written in glacier-gorge and water-carved cañon!
I think such vastness of prospect now and then extremely valuable in itself; it forcibly widens one’s conception of country, driving away such false notion of extent or narrowing idea of limitation as we get in living on lower plains.