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Show 230, experience might take in a future book; "Vide Rain Storm on Mount Yuba" places "Snow Storm on Mount Shasta" in the canon of Stormy Sermons. This is the narrative his father read and found so reprehensible. No doubt Muir felt a need to justify this kind of primitive experience to others as well, and the later more complete versions of his adventure justify the risks by delineating the rewards. After climbing the summit in November he made camp below timberline where he had the company of an occasional Douglas squirrel or mountain sheep. He wrote that he enjoyed this storm-bound position for a week, "lying like a squirrel in a warm, fluffy nest," busying himself with his own affairs, "and wishing only to be let alone." Finally sought by the people of Sisson's resort, who feared that he had perished, he was compelled to return to the lowlands, his winter incomplete, But the next spring, on the other side of this eventful winter, I saw and felt still more of the Shasta snow. For then it was my fortune to get into the very heart of a storm, and to be held in it for a long time. The spring storm was narrated most carefully for Harper's in 1877. Not willing to say that he would deliberately expose himself to the danger of a summit bivouac, he explained that the expedition was ostensibly for the purpose of measuring by barometrical observations the summit of Shasta. Science made him do it? No, the real lesson in altitude was heard from the words of the storm which he met, after the mechanical devices were packed away. |