This autumnal mellowness usually lasts until the end of November.  Then come days of quite another kind.  The winter clouds grow, and bloom, and shed their starry crystals on every leaf and rock, and all the colors vanish like a sunset.  The deer gather and hasten down their well-known trails, fearful of being snow-bound.  Storm succeeds storm, heaping snow on the cliffs and meadows, and bending the slender pines to the ground in wide arches, one over the other, clustering and interlacing like lodged wheat.  Avalanches rush and boom from the shelving heights, piling immense heaps upon the frozen lake, and all the summer glory is buried and lost.  Yet in the midst of this hearty winter the sun shines warm at times, calling the Douglas squirrel to frisk in the snowy pines and seek out his hidden stores; and the weather is never so severe as to drive away the grouse and little nut-hatches and chickadees.

Toward May, the lake begins to open.  The hot sun sends down innumerable streams over the cliffs, streaking them round and round with foam.  The snow slowly vanishes, and the meadows show tintings of green.  Then spring comes on apace; flowers and flies enrich the air and the sod, and the deer come back to the upper groves like birds to an old nest.

I first discovered this charming lake in the autumn of 1872, while on my way to the glaciers at the head of the river.  It was rejoicing then in its gayest colors, untrodden, hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.  Year after year I walked its shores without discovering any other trace of humanity than the remains of an Indian camp-fire, and the thigh-bones of a deer that had been broken to get at the marrow.  It lies out of the regular ways of Indians, who love to hunt in more accessible fields adjacent to trails.  Their knowledge of deer-haunts had probably enticed them here some hunger-time when they wished to make sure of a feast; for hunting in this lake-hollow is like hunting in a fenced park.  I had told the beauty of Shadow Lake only to a few friends, fearing it might come to be trampled and “improved” like Yosemite.  On my last visit, as I was sauntering along the shore on the strip of sand between the water and sod, reading the tracks of the wild animals that live here, I was startled by a human track, which I at once saw belonged to some shepherd; for each step was turned out 35 deg. or 40 deg. from the general course pursued, and was also run over in an uncertain sprawling fashion at the heel, while a row of round dots on the right indicated the staff that shepherds carry.  None but a shepherd could make such a track, and after tracing it a few minutes I began to fear that he might be seeking pasturage; for what else could he be seeking?  Returning from the glaciers shortly afterward, nay worst fears were realized.  A trail had been made down the mountain-side from the north, and all the gardens and meadows were destroyed by a horde of hoofed locusts, as if swept by a fire.  The money-changers were in the temple.