ut the Kern and King's river divide for storm study, or the short,
wide-mouthed canons opening eastward on high valleys. Days when the
hollows are steeped in a warm, winey flood the clouds come walking on
the floor of heaven, flat and pearly gray beneath, rounded and pearly
white above. They gather flock-wise, moving on the level currents that
roll about the peaks, lock hands and settle with the cooler air, drawing
a veil about those places where they do their work. If their meeting or
parting takes place at sunrise or sunset, as it often does, one gets the
splendor of the apocalypse. There will be cloud pillars miles high,
snow-capped, glorified, and preserving an orderly perspective before the
unbarred door of the sun, or perhaps mere ghosts of clouds that dance to
some pied piper of an unfelt wind. But be it day or night, once they
have settled to their work, one sees from the valley only the blank wall
of their tents stretched along the ranges. To get the real effect of a
mountain storm you must be inside.

One who goes often into a hill country learns not to say: What if it
should rain? It always does rain somewhere among the peaks: the unusual
thing is that one should escape it. You might suppose that if you took
any account of plant contrivances to save their pollen powder against
showers. Note how many there are deep-throated and bell-flowered like
the pentstemons, how many have nodding pedicels as the columbine, how
many grow in copse shelters and grow there only. There is keen delight
in the quick showers of summer canons, with the added comfort, born of
experience, of knowing that no harm comes of a wetting at high
altitudes. The day is warm; a white cloud spies over the canon wall,
slips up behind the ridge to cross it by some windy pass, obscures your
sun. Next you hear the rain drum on the broad-leaved hellebore, and beat
down the mimulus beside the brook. You shelter on the lee of some strong
pine with shut-winged butterflies and merry, fiddling creatures of the
wood. Runnels of rain water from the glacier-slips swirl through the
pine needles into rivulets; the streams froth and rise in their banks.
The sky is white with cloud; the sky is gray with rain; the sky is
clear. The summer showers leave no wake.

Such as these follow each other day by day for weeks in August weather.
Sometimes they chill suddenly into wet snow that packs about the lake
gardens clear to the blossom frills, and melts away harmless