Here, too, you may find the curious but unlovable darlingtonia, a carnivorous plant that devours bumblebees, grasshoppers, ants, moths, and other insects, with insatiable appetite.  In approaching it, its suspicious-looking yellow-spotted hood and watchful attitude will be likely to make you go cautiously through the bog where it stands, as if you were approaching a dangerous snake.  It also occurs in a bog near Sothern’s Station on the stage road, where I first saw it, and in other similar bogs throughout the mountains hereabouts.

The “Big Spring” of the Sacramento is about a mile and a half above Sisson’s, issuing from the base of a drift-covered hill.  It is lined with emerald algae and mosses, and shaded with alder, willow, and thorn bushes, which give it a fine setting.  Its waters, apparently unaffected by flood or drouth, heat or cold, fall at once into white rapids with a rush and dash, as if glad to escape from the darkness to begin their wild course down the canyon to the plain.

Muir’s Peak, a few miles to the north of the spring, rises about three thousand feet above the plain on which it stands, and is easily climbed.  The view is very fine and well repays the slight walk to its summit, from which much of your way about the mountain may be studied and chosen.  The view obtained of the Whitney Glacier should tempt you to visit it, since it is the largest of the Shasta glaciers and its lower portion abounds in beautiful and interesting cascades and crevasses.  It is three or four miles long and terminates at an elevation of about nine thousand five hundred feet above sea level, in moraine-sprinkled ice cliffs sixty feet high.  The long gray slopes leading up to the glacier seem remarkably smooth and unbroken.  They are much interrupted, nevertheless, with abrupt, jagged precipitous gorges, which though offering instructive sections of the lavas for examination, would better be shunned by most people.  This may be done by keeping well down on the base until fronting the glacier before beginning the ascent.

The gorge through which the glacier is drained is raw-looking, deep and narrow, and indescribably jagged.  The walls in many places overhang; in others they are beveled, loose, and shifting where the channel has been eroded by cinders, ashes, strata of firm lavas, and glacial drift, telling of many a change from frost to fire and their attendant floods of mud and water.  Most of the drainage of the glacier vanishes at once in the porous rocks to reappear in springs in the distant valley, and it is only in time of flood that the channel carries much water; then there are several fine falls in the gorge, six hundred feet or more in height.  Snow lies in it the year round at an elevation of eight thousand five hundred feet, and in sheltered spots a thousand feet lower.  Tracing this wild changing channel-gorge, gully, or canyon, the sections will show Mount Shasta as a huge palimpsest, containing the records, layer upon layer, of strangely contrasted events in its fiery-icy history.  But look well to your footing, for the way will test the skill of the most cautious mountaineers.