The Yosemite National Park
Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the
best. Though extremely rugged, with its main features on the grandest
scale in height and depth, it is nevertheless easy of access and
hospitable; and its marvelous beauty, displayed in striking and
alluring forms, wooes the admiring wanderer on and on, higher and
higher, charmed and enchanted. Benevolent, solemn, fateful, pervaded
with divine light, every landscape glows like a countenance hallowed in
eternal repose; and every one of its living creatures, clad in flesh
and leaves, and every crystal of its rocks, whether on the surface
shining in the sun or buries miles deep in what we call darkness, is
throbbing and pulsing with the heartbeats of God. All the world lies
warm in one heart, yet the Sierra seems to get more light than other
mountains. The weather is mostly sunshine embellished with magnificent
storms, and nearly everything shines from base to summit,—the rocks,
streams, lakes, glaciers, irised falls, and the forests of silver fir
and silver pine. And how bright is the shining after summer showers and
dewy nights, and after frosty nights in spring and autumn, when the
morning sunbeams are pouring through the crystals on the bushes and
grass, and in winter through the snow-laden trees!
[Illustration: A Thunder-Storm in the Sierras.]
The average cloudiness for the whole year is perhaps less than ten
hundredths. Scarcely a day of all the summer is dark, though there is
no lack of magnificent thundering cumuli. They rise in the warm midday
hours, mostly over the middle region, in June and July, like new
mountain ranges, higher Sierras, mightily augmenting the grandeur of
the scenery while giving rain to the forests and gardens and bringing
forth their fragrance. The wonderful weather and beauty inspire
everybody to be up and doing. Every summer day is a workday to be
confidently counted on, the short dashes of rain forming, not
interruptions, but rests. The big blessed storm days of winter, when
the whole range stands white, are not a whit less inspiring and kind.
Well may the Sierra be called the Range of Light, not the Snowy Range;
for only in winter is it white; while all the year it is bright.
Of this glorious range the Yosemite National Park is a central section,
thirty-six miles in length and forty-eight miles in breadth. The famous
Yosemite Valley lies in the heart of it, and it includes the head
waters of the Tuolumne and Merced rivers, two of the most songful
streams in the world; innumerable lakes and waterfalls and smooth silky
lawns; the noblest forests, the loftiest granite domes, the deepest
ice-sculptured cañons, the brightest crystalline pavements, and snowy
mountains soaring into the sky twelve and thirteen thousand feet,
arrayed in open ranks and spiry pinnacled groups partially separated by
tremendous cañons and amphitheatres; gardens on their sunny brows
avalanches thundering down their long white slopes, cataracts roaring
gray and foaming in the crooked rugged gorges, and glaciers in their
shadowy recesses working in silence, slowly completing their sculpture;
new-born lakes at their feet, blue and green, free or encumbered with
drifting icebergs like miniature Arctic Oceans, shining, sparkling,
calm as stars.
Nowhere will you see the majestic operations of nature more clearly
revealed beside the frailest, most gentle and peaceful things. Nearly
all the park is a profound solitude. Yet it is full of charming
company, full of God’s thoughts, a place of peace and safety amid the
most exalted grandeur and eager enthusiastic action, a new song, a
place of beginnings abounding in first lessons on life,
mountain-building, eternal, invincible, unbreakable order; with sermons
in stones, storms, trees, flowers, and animals brimful of humanity.
During the last glacial period, just past, the former features of the
range were rubbed off as a chalk sketch from a blackboard, and a new
beginning was made. Hence the wonderful clearness and freshness of the
rocky pages.
But to get all this into words is a hopeless task. The leanest sketch
of each feature would need a whole chapter. Nor would any amount of
space, however industriously scribbled, be of much avail. To defrauded
town toilers, parks in magazine articles are like pictures of bread to
the hungry. I can write only hints to incite good wanderers to come to
the feast.
While this glorious park embraces big, generous samples of the very
best of the Sierra treasure, it is, fortunately, at the same time, the
most accessible portion. It lies opposite San Francisco, at a distance
of about one hundred and forty miles. Railroads connected with all the
continent reach into the foothills, and three good carriage roads, from
Big Oak Flat, Coulterville, and Raymond, run into Yosemite Valley.
Another, called the Tioga road, runs from Crocker’s Station on the
Yosemite Big Oak Flat road near the Tuolumne Big Tree Grove, right
across the park to the summit of the range by way of Lake Tenaya, the
Big Tuolumne Meadows, and Mount Dana. These roads, with many trials
that radiate from Yosemite Valley, bring most of the park within reach
of everybody, well or half well.
The three main natural divisions of the park, the lower, middle, and
alpine regions, are fairly well defined in altitude, topographical
features, and vegetation. The lower, with an average elevation of about
five thousand feet, is the region of the great forests, made up of
sugar pine, the largest and most beautiful of all the pines in the
world; the silvery yellow pine, the next in rank; Douglas spruce,
libocedrus, the white and red silver firs, and the Sequoia gigantea, or
“big tree,” the king of conifers, the noblest of a noble race. On warm
slopes next the foothills there are a few Sabine nut pines; oaks make
beautiful groves in the cañon valleys; and poplar, alder, maple,
laurel, and Nuttall’s flowering dogwood shade the banks of the streams.
Many of the pines are more than two hundred feet high, but they are not
crowded together. The sunbeams streaming through their feathery arches
brighten the ground, and you walk beneath the radiant ceiling in devout
subdued mood, as if you were in a grand cathedral with mellow light
sifting through colored windows, while the flowery pillared aisles open
enchanting vistas in every direction. Scarcely a peak or ridge in the
whole region rises bare above the forests, though they are thinly
planted in some places where the soil is shallow. From the cool breezy
heights you look abroad over a boundless waving sea of evergreens,
covering hill and ridge and smooth-flowing slope as far as the eye can
reach, and filling every hollow and down-plunging ravine in glorious
triumphant exuberance.
Perhaps the best general view of the pine forests of the park, and one
of the best in the range, is obtained from the top of the Merced and
Tuolumne divide near Hazel Green. On the long, smooth, finely folded
slopes of the main ridge, at a height of five to six thousand feet
above the sea, they reach most perfect development and are marshaled to
view in magnificent towering ranks, their colossal spires and domes and
broad palmlike crowns, deep in the kind sky, rising above one
another,—a multitude of giants in perfect health and beauty,—sun-fed
mountaineers rejoicing in their strength, chanting with the winds, in
accord with the falling waters. The ground is mostly open and inviting
to walkers. The fragrant chamæbatia is outspread in rich carpets miles
in extent; the manzanita, in orchard-like groves, covered with pink
bell-shaped flowers in the spring, grows in openings facing the sun,
hazel and buckthorn in the dells; warm brows are purple with mint,
yellow with sunflowers and violets; and tall lilies ring their bells
around the borders of meadows and along the ferny, mossy banks of the
streams. Never was mountain forest more lavishly furnished.
Hazel Green is a good place quietly to camp and study, to get
acquainted with the trees and birds, to drink the reviving water and
weather, and to watch the changing lights of the big charmed days. The
rose light of the dawn, creeping higher among the stars, changes to
daffodil yellow; then come the level enthusiastic sunbeams pouring
across the feathery ridges, touching pine after pine, spruce and fir,
libocedrus and lordly sequoia, searching every recess, until all are
awakened and warmed. In the white noon they shine in silvery splendor,
every needle and cell in bole and branch thrilling and tingling with
ardent life; and the whole landscape glows with consciousness, like the
face of a god. The hours go by uncounted. The evening flames with
purple and gold. The breeze that has been blowing from the lowlands
dies away, and far and near the mighty host of trees baptized in the
purple flood stand hushed and thoughtful, awaiting the sun’s blessing
and farewell,—as impressive a ceremony as if it were never to rise
again. When the daylight fades, the night breeze from the snowy summits
begins to blow, and the trees, waving and rustling beneath the stars,
breathe free again.
It is hard to leave such camps and woods; nevertheless, to the large
majority of travelers the middle region of the park is still more
interesting, for it has the most striking features of all the Sierra
scenery,—the deepest sections of the famous cañons, of which the
Yosemite Valley, Hetch-Hetchy Valley, and many smaller ones are wider
portions, with level parklike floors and walls of immense height and
grandeur of sculpture. This middle region holds also the greater number
of the beautiful glacier lakes and glacier meadows, the great granite
domes, and the most brilliant and most extensive of the glacier
pavements. And though in large part it is severely rocky and bare, it
is still rich in trees. The magnificent silver fir (_Abies magnifica_),
which ranks with the giants, forms a continuous belt across the park
above the pines at an elevation of from seven to nine thousand feet,
and north and south of the park boundaries to the extremities of the
range, only slightly interrupted by the main cañons. The two-leaved or
tamarack pine makes another less regular belt along the upper margin of
the region, while between these two belts, and mingling with them, in
groves or scattered, are the mountain hemlock, the most graceful of
evergreens; the noble mountain pine; the Jeffrey form of the yellow
pine, with big cones and long needles; and the brown, burly, sturdy
Western juniper. All these, except the juniper, which grows on bald
rocks, have plenty of flowery brush about them, and gardens in open
spaces.
Here, too, lies the broad, shining heavily sculptured region of
primeval granite, which best tells the story of the glacial period on
the Pacific side of the continent. No other mountain chain on the
globe, as far as I know, is so rich as the Sierra in bold, striking,
well-preserved glacial monuments, easily understood by anybody capable
of patient observation. Every feature is more or less glacial, and this
park portion of the range is the brightest and clearest of all. Not a
peak, ridge, dome, cañon, lake basin, garden, forest, or stream but in
some way explains the past existence and modes of action of flowing,
grinding, sculpturing, soil-making, scenery-making ice. For,
notwithstanding the post-glacial agents—air, rain, frost, rivers,
earthquakes, avalanches—have been at work upon the greater part of the
range for tens of thousands of stormy years, engraving their own
characters over those of the ice, the latter are so heavily emphasized
and enduring they still rise in sublime relief, clear and legible
through every after inscription. The streams have traced only shallow
wrinkles as yet, and avalanche, wind, rain, and melting snow have made
blurs and scars, but the change effected on the face of the landscape
is not greater than is made on the face of a mountaineer by a single
year of weathering.
Of all the glacial phenomena presented here, the most striking and
attractive to travelers are the polished pavements, because they are so
beautiful, and their beauty is of so rare a kind,—unlike any part of
the loose earthy lowlands where people dwell and earn their bread. They
are simply flat or gently undulating areas of solid resisting granite,
the unchanged surface over which the ancient glaciers flowed. They are
found in the most perfect condition at an elevation of from eight to
nine thousand feet above sea level. Some are miles in extent, only
slightly blurred or scarred by spots that have at last yielded to the
weather; while the best preserved portions are brilliantly polished,
and reflect the sunbeams as calm water or glass, shining as if rubbed
and burnished every day, notwithstanding they have been exposed to
plashing, corroding rains, dew, frost, and melting sloppy snows for
thousands of years.
The attention of hunters and prospectors, who see so much in their wild
journeys, is seldom attracted by moraines, however regular and
artificial-looking; or rocks, however boldly sculptured; or cañons,
however deep and sheer-walled. But when they come to these pavements,
they go down on their knees and rub their hands admiringly on the
glistening surface, and try hard to account for its mysterious
smoothness and brightness. They may have seen the winter avalanches
come down the mountains, through the woods, sweeping away the trees and
scouring the ground; but they conclude that this cannot be the work of
avalanches, because the striæ show that the agent, whatever it was,
flowed along and around and over the top of high ridges and domes, and
also filled the deep cañons. Neither can they see how water could be
the agent, for the strange polish is found thousands of feet above the
reach of any conceivable flood. Only the winds seem capable of moving
over the face of the country in the directions indicated by the lines
and grooves.
The pavements are particularly fine around Lake Tenaya, and have
suggested the Indian name Py-we-ack, the Lake of the Shining Rocks.
Indians seldom trouble themselves with geological questions, but a Mono
Indian once came to me and asked if I could tell him what made the
rocks so smooth at Tenaya. Even dogs and horses, on their first
journeys into this region, study geology to the extent of gazing
wonderingly at the strange brightness of the ground, and pawing it and
smelling it, as if afraid of falling or sinking.
In the production of this admirable hard finish, the glaciers in many
places exerted a pressure of more than a hundred tons to the square
foot, planing down granite, slate, and quartz alike, showing their
structure, and making beautiful mosaics where large feldspar crystals
form the greater part of the rock. On such pavements the sunshine is at
times dazzling, as if the surface were of burnished silver.
Here, also, are the brightest of the Sierra landscapes in general. The
regions lying at the same elevation to the north and south were perhaps
subjected to as long and intense a glaciation; but because the rocks
are less resisting, their polished surfaces have mostly given way to
the weather, leaving here and there only small imperfect patches on the
most enduring portions of cañon walls protected from the action of rain
and snow, and on hard bosses kept comparatively dry by boulders. The
short, steeply inclined cañons of the east flank of the range are in
some places brightly polished, but they are far less magnificent than
those of the broad west flank.
One of the best general views of the middle region of the park is to be
had from the top of a majestic dome which long ago I named the Glacier
Monument. It is situated a few miles to the north of Cathedral Peak,
and rises to a height of about fifteen hundred feet above its base and
ten thousand above the sea. At first sight it seems sternly
inaccessible, but a good climber will find that it may be scaled on the
south side. Approaching it from this side you pass through a dense
bryanthus-fringed grove of mountain hemlock, catching glimpses now and
then of the colossal dome towering to an immense height above the dark
evergreens; and when at last you have made your way across woods,
wading through azalea and ledum thickets, you step abruptly out of the
tree shadows and mossy leafy softness upon a bare porphyry pavement,
and behold the dome unveiled in all its grandeur. Fancy a nicely
proportioned monument, eight or ten feet high, hewn from one stone,
standing in a pleasure ground; magnify it to a height of fifteen
hundred feet, retaining its simplicity of form and fineness, and cover
its surface with crystals; then you may gain an idea of the sublimity
and beauty of this ice-burnished dome, one of many adorning this
wonderful park.
In making the ascent, one finds that the curve of the base rapidly
steepens, until one is in danger of slipping; but feldspar crystals,
two or three inches long, that have been weathered into relief, afford
slight footholds. The summit is in part burnished, like the sides and
base, the striæ and scratches indicating that the mighty Tuolumne
Glacier, two or three thousand feet deep, overwhelmed it while it stood
firm like a boulder at the bottom of a river. The pressure it withstood
must have been enormous. Had it been less solidly built, it would have
been ground and crushed into moraine fragments, like the general mass
of the mountain flank in which at first it lay imbedded; for it is only
a hard residual knob or knot with a concentric structure of superior
strength, brought into relief by the removal of the less resisting rock
about it,—an illustration in stone of the survival of the strongest and
most favorably situated.
[Illustration: Glacier Monument (Fairview Dome).]
Hardly less wonderful, when we contemplate the storms it has
encountered since first it saw the light, is its present unwasted
condition. The whole quantity of postglacial wear and tear it has
suffered has not diminished its stature a single inch, as may be
readily shown by measuring from the level of the unchanged polished
portions of the surface. Indeed, the average postglacial denudation of
the entire region, measured in the same way, is found to be less than
two inches,—a mighty contrast to that of the ice; for the glacial
denudation here has been not less than a mile; that is, in developing
the present landscapes, an amount of rock a mile in average thickness
has been silently carried away by flowing ice during the last glacial
period.
A few erratic boulders nicely poised on the founded summit of the
monument tell an interesting story. They came from a mountain on the
crest of the range, about twelve miles to the eastward, floating like
chips on the frozen sea, and were stranded here when the top of the
monument emerged to the light of day, while the companions of these
boulders, whose positions chanced to be over the slopes where they
could not find rest, were carried farther on by the shallowing current.
The general view from the summit consists of a sublime assemblage of
iceborn mountains and rocks and long wavering ridges, lakes and streams
and meadows, moraines in wide-sweeping belts, and beds covered and
dotted with forests and groves,—hundreds of square miles of them
composed in wild harmony. The snowy mountains on the axis of the range,
mostly sharp-peaked and crested, rise in a noble array along the sky to
the eastward and northward; the gray-pillared Hoffman spur and the
Yosemite domes and a countless number of others to the westward;
Cathedral Peak with its many spires and companion peaks and domes to
the southward; and a smooth billowy multitude of rocks, from fifty feet
or less to a thousand feet high, which from their peculiar form seem to
be rolling on westward, fill most of the middle ground. Immediately
beneath you are the Big Tuolumne Meadows, with an ample swath of dark
pine woods on either side, enlivened by the young river, that is seen
sparkling and shimmering as it sways from side to side, tracing as best
it can its broad glacial channel.
The ancient Tuolumne Glacier, lavishly flooded by many a noble affluent
from the snow-laden flanks of Mounts Dana, Gibbs, Lyell, Maclure, and
others nameless as yet, poured its majestic overflowing current, four
or five miles wide, directly against the high outstanding mass of Mount
Hoffman, which divided and deflected it right and left, just as a river
is divided against an island that stands in the middle of its channel.
Two distinct glaciers were thus formed, one of which flowed through the
Big Tuolumne Cañon and Hetch-Hetchy Valley, while the other swept
upward five hundred feet in a broad current across the divide between
the basins of the Tuolumne and Merced into the Tenaya basin, and thence
down through the Tenaya Cañon and Yosemite Valley.
The maplike distinctness and freshness of this glacial landscape cannot
fail to excite the attention of every observer, no matter how little of
its scientific significance he may at first recognize. These bald,
glossy, westward-leaning rocks in the open middle ground, with their
rounded backs and shoulders toward the glacier fountains of the summit
mountains and their split angular fronts looking in the opposite
direction, every one of them displaying the form of greatest strength
with reference to physical structure and glacial action, show the
tremendous force with which through unnumbered centuries the ice flood
swept over them, and also the direction of the flow; while the
mountains, with their sharp summits and abraded sides, indicate the
height to which the glacier rose; and the moraines, curving and swaying
in beautiful lines, mark the boundaries of the main trunk and its
tributaries as they existed toward the close of the glacial winter.
None of the commercial highways of the sea or land, marked with buoys
and lamps, fences and guideboards, is so unmistakably indicated as are
these channels of the vanished Tuolumne glaciers.
The action of flowing ice, whether in the form of river-like glaciers
or broad mantling folds, is but little understood as compared with that
of other sculpturing agents. Rivers work openly where people dwell, and
so do the rain, and the sea thundering on all the shores of the world;
and the universal ocean of air, through unseen, speaks aloud in a
thousand voices and explains its modes of working and its power. But
glaciers, back in their cold solitudes, work apart from men, exerting
their tremendous energies in silence and darkness. Coming in vapor from
the sea, flying invisible on the wind, descending in snow, changing to
ice, white, spiritlike, they brood outspread over the predestined
landscapes, working on unwearied through unmeasured ages, until in the
fullness of time the mountains and valleys are brought forth, channels
furrowed for the rivers, basins made for meadows and lakes, and soil
beds spread for the forests and fields that man and beast may be fed.
Then vanishing like clouds, they melt into streams and go singing back
home to the sea.
To an observer upon this adamantine old monument in the midst of such
scenery, getting glimpses of the thoughts of God, the day seems
endless, the sun stands still. Much faithless fuss is made over the
passage in the Bible telling of the standing still of the sun for
Joshua. Here you may learn that the miracle occurs for every devout
mountaineer, for everybody doing anything worth doing, seeing anything
worth seeing. One day is as a thousand years, a thousand years as one
day, and while yet in the flesh you enjoy immortality.
From the monument you will find an easy way down through the woods and
along the Big Tuolumne Meadows to Mount Dana, the summit of which
commands a grand telling view of the alpine region. The scenery all the
way is inspiring, and you saunter on without knowing that you are
climbing. The spacious sunny meadows, through the midst of which the
bright river glides, extend with but little interruption ten miles to
the eastward, dark woods rising on either side to the limit of tree
growth, and above the woods a picturesque line of gray peaks and spires
dotted with snow banks; while, on the axis of the Sierra, Mount Dana
and his noble compeers repose in massive sublimity, their vast size and
simple flowing contours contrasting in the most striking manner with
the clustering spires and thin-pinnacled crests crisply outlined on the
horizon to the north and south of them.
Tracing the silky lawns, gradually ascending, gazing at the sublime
scenery more and more openly unfolded, noting the avalanche gaps in the
upper forests, lingering over beds of blue gentians and purple-flowered
bryanthus and cassiope, and dwarf willows an inch high in close-felted
gray carpets, brightened here and there with kalmia and soft creeping
mats of vaccinium sprinkled with pink bells that seem to have been
showered down from the sky like hail,—thus beguiled and enchanted, you
reach the base of the mountain wholly unconscious of the miles you have
walked. And so on to the summit. For all the way up the long red slate
slopes, that in the distance seemed barren, you find little garden beds
and tufts of dwarf phlox, ivesia, and blue arctic daisies that go
straight to your heart, blessed fellow mountaineers kept safe and warm
by a thousand miracles. You are now more than thirteen thousand feet
above the sea, and to the north and south you behold a sublime
wilderness of mountains in glorious array, their snowy summits towering
together in crowded, bewildering abundance, shoulder to shoulder, peak
beyond peak. To the east lies the Great Basin, barren-looking and
silent, apparently a land of pure desolation, rich only in beautiful
light. Mono Lake, fourteen miles long, is outspread below you at a
depth of nearly seven thousand feet, its shores of volcanic ashes and
sand, treeless and sunburned; a group of volcanic cones, with
well-formed, unwasted craters rises to the south of the lake; while up
from its eastern shore innumerable mountains with soft flowing outlines
extend range beyond range, gray, and pale purple, and blue,—the
farthest gradually fading on the flowing horizon. Westward you look
down and over the countless moraines, glacier meadows, and grand sea of
domes and rock waves of the upper Tuolumne basin, the Cathedral and
Hoffman mountains with their wavering lines and zones of forest, the
wonderful region to the north of the Tuolumne Cañon, and across the
dark belt of silver firs to the pale mountains of the coast.
In the icy fountains of the Mount Lyell and Ritter groups of peaks, to
the south of Dana, three of the most important of the Sierra rivers—the
Tuolumne, Merced, and San Joaquin—take their rise, their highest
tributaries being within a few miles of one another as they rush forth
on their adventurous courses from beneath snow banks and glaciers.
[Illustration: Along the Crest of the High Sierras from the Summit of
Mt. Lyell (13,090 feet).]
Of the small shrinking glaciers of the Sierra, remnants of the majestic
system that sculptured the range, I have seen sixty-five. About
twenty-five of them are in the park, and eight are in sight from Mount
Dana.
The glacier lakes are sprinkled over all the alpine and subalpine
regions, gleaming like eyes beneath heavy rock brows, tree-fringed or
bare, embosomed in the woods, or lying in open basins with green and
purple meadows around them; but the greater number are in the cool
shadowy hollows of the summit mountains not far from the glaciers, the
highest lying at an elevation of from eleven to nearly twelve thousand
feet above the sea. The whole number in the Sierra, not counting the
smallest, can hardly be less than fifteen hundred, of which about two
hundred and fifty are in the park. From one standpoint, on Red
Mountain, I counted forty-two, most of them within a radius of ten
miles. The glacier meadows, which are spread over the filled-up basins
of vanished lakes and form one of the most charming features of the
scenery, are still more numerous than the lakes.
An observer stationed here, in the glacial period, would have
overlooked a wrinkled mantle of ice as continuous as that which now
covers the continent of Greenland; and of all the vast landscape now
shining in the sun, he would have seen only the tops of the summit
peaks, rising darkly like storm-beaten islands, lifeless and hopeless,
above rock-encumbered ice waves. If among the agents that nature has
employed in making these mountains there be one that above all other
deserves the name of Destroyer, it is the glacier. But we quickly learn
that destruction is creation. During the dreary centuries through which
the Sierra lay in darkness, crushed beneath the ice folds of the
glacial winter, there was a steady invincible advance toward the warm
life and beauty of to-day; and it is just where the glaciers crushed
most destructively that the greatest amount of beauty is made manifest.
But as these landscapes have succeeded the preglacial landscapes, so
they in turn are giving place to others already planned and foreseen.
The granite domes and pavements, apparently imperishable, we take as
symbols of permanence, while these crumbling peaks, down whose frosty
gullies avalanches are ever falling, are symbols of change and decay.
Yet all alike, fast or slow, are surely vanishing away.
Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and
destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest
but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one
beautiful form into another.