Some enterprising
speculator, who has since ceased to take the original seventy-five
cents' toll, a few years ago built a substantial set of rude ladders
against the perpendicular wall over which Pi-wi-ack rushes. We found it
still standing, and climbed the dizzy height in a shower of spray, so
close to the edge of the fall that we could almost wet our hands in its
rim. Once at the top, we found that Nature had been as accommodating to
the sight-seer as man himself; for the ledge we landed on was a perfect
breastwork, built from the receding precipices on either side of the
_canon_ to the very crown of the cataract. The weakest nerves need not
have trembled, when once within the parapet, on the smooth, flat
rampart, and looking down into the tremendous boiling chasm whence we
had just climbed.
Above Pi-wi-ack the river runs for a mile at the bottom of a granite
cradle, sloping upward from it on each side at an angle of about
forty-five degrees, in great tabular masses slippery as ice, without a
crevice in them for thirty yards at a stretch where even the scraggiest
_manzanita_ may catch hold and grow. This tilted formation, broken here
and there by spots of scanty alluvium and stunted pines, continues
upward till it intersects the posterior cone of the South Dome on one
side and a colossal castellated precipice on the other,--creating thus
the very typical landscape of sublime desolation.
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