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Show THE CENTENNIAL STATE. 479 mining region, where we will delay for a more specific description, the reader to look on while the writer climbs and talks. The lowlander, whom business or a love of novelty and wild scenery leads to climb one of the mountains around Georgetown, finds material for continual astonishment in the changes which unfold along his upward way. The white spots seen from below, enlarge to gray faces on the rocky cliffs, often hundreds of feet perpendicular; the darker shades, which seem from the valley mere breaks on the view, open to immense gorges, down which pour torrents of almost ice- cold water from the snow- fed lakes on the summit, and the green plats which pleased the eye as distant masses of shrubbery or thickets of sage- brush, swell on near approach to magnificent forests of mountain pine. The thin dyke of yellow- gray rock, which seems to cap the summit with rectangular blocks, apparently smooth enough to have been set and polished by human hands, swells out slowly as he climbs, till at last it towers hundreds of feet above the general summit level, a solid battlement of weather- beaten granite or trap rock, sometimes in monstrous cubes, but oftener in broken and serrated pinnacles like saw- teeth, fully justifying the Spanish appellation of Sierra ( a saw). From the streets of Georgetown the gulches which divide the spurs into separate mining districts are barely visible; the face of the mountain between the more abrupt cliffs is tolerably smooth, and ex-cept the slope towards the valley it seems that one might drive a wheeled carriage along its side, or that a stone once started would roll into the city. Once on that slope, however, and the marks are found to be gulches often a hundred feet in depth; and instead of the face of one mountain we appear to have a hundred narrow " hog-backs," in the sides of which are openings into the rock and tunnel workings invisible from below. Our party of seven sets out early, for our first ascent of Griffith Mountain will occupy half a day, and the first stage is up the face of a bare rock, eight hundred feet high, and barely broken enough to afford a foot- path ; thence by a more gentle trail along the foot of a granite cliff, which rises three hundred feet almost perpendicularly. And yet every yard on its front has been tried with the pick or sounded with the hammer, to see if it contained mineral: for in just such places have been found some of the richest mines of the district. A peculiar stain on the rock attracted attention. Men were let down from above to " prospect," a crevice wr as found with " blossom " rock, and often a platform anchored to the cliff till a more permanent foot-ing could be blasted out. The celebrated Stevens' Mine was reached |
