I
Yosemite won my heart at once, as it seems to win the hearts of all
who visit it. In my case many things helped to do it, but I am sure
a robin, the first I had seen since leaving home, did his part. He
struck the right note, he brought the scene home to me, he supplied
the link of association. There he was, running over the grass or
perching on the fence, or singing from a tree-top in the old
familiar way. Where the robin is at home, there at home am I. But
many other things helped to win my heart to the Yosemite--the whole
character of the scene, not only its beauty and sublimity, but the
air of peace and protection, and of homelike seclusion that pervades
it; the charm of a nook, a retreat, combined with the power and
grandeur of nature in her sternest moods.
After passing from the hotel at El Portal along the foaming and
roaring Merced River, and amid the tumbled confusion of enormous
granite boulders shaken down from the cliffs above, you cross the
threshold of the great valley as into some vast house or hall carved
out of the mountains, and at once feel the spell of the brooding
calm and sheltered seclusion that pervades it. You pass suddenly
from the tumultuous, the chaotic, into the ordered, the tranquil,
the restful, which seems enhanced by the power and grandeur that
encompass them about. You can hardly be prepared for the hush that
suddenly falls upon the river and for the gentle rural and sylvan
character of much that surrounds you; the peace of the fields, the
seclusion of the woods, the privacy of sunny glades, the enchantment
of falls and lucid waters, with a touch of human occupancy here and
there--all this, set in that enormous granite frame, three or four
thousand feet high, ornamented with domes and spires and peaks still
higher,--it is all this that wins your heart and fills your
imagination in the Yosemite.
As you ride or walk along the winding road up the level valley amid
the noble pines and spruces and oaks, and past the groves and bits
of meadow and the camps of many tents, and the huge mossy granite
boulders here and there reposing in the shade of the trees, with the
full, clear, silent river winding through the plain near you, you
are all the time aware of those huge vertical walls, their faces
scarred and niched, streaked with color, or glistening with
moisture, and animated with waterfalls, rising up on either hand,
thousands of feet high, not architectural, or like something
builded, but like the sides and the four corners of the globe
itself. What an impression of mass and of power and of grandeur in
repose filters into you as you walk along! El Capitan stands there
showing its simple sweeping lines through the trees as you approach,
like one of the veritable pillars of the firmament. How long we are
nearing it and passing it! It is so colossal that it seems near
while it is yet far off. It is so simple that the eye takes in its
naked grandeur at a glance. It demands of you a new standard of size
which you cannot at once produce. It is as clean and smooth as the
flank of a horse, and as poised and calm as a Greek statue. It
curves out toward the base as if planted there to resist the
pressure of worlds--probably the most majestic single granite
column or mountain buttress on the earth. Its summit is over three
thousand feet above you. Across the valley, nearly opposite, rise
the Cathedral Rocks to nearly the same height, while farther along,
beyond El Capitan, the Three Brothers shoulder the sky at about the
same dizzy height. Near the head of the great valley, North Dome,
perfect in outline as if turned in a lathe, and its brother, the
Half Dome (or shall we say half-brother?) across the valley, look
down upon Mirror Lake from an altitude of over four thousand feet.
These domes suggest enormous granite bubbles if such were possible
pushed up from below and retaining their forms through the vast
geologic ages. Of course they must have weathered enormously, but as
the rock seems to peel off in concentric sheets, their forms are
preserved.