John Muir: Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies, Memoirs & Letters (Illustrated Edition)
and one is now and then found thirty feet in diameter, but very rarely any larger. The grandest specimen that I have measured is a stump about ninety feet high, which is thirty-five feet, eight inches in diameter, measured inside the bark, above the bulging base. The wood is dull purplish red in color, easily worked, and very enduring; lasting, even when exposed to the weather, for hundreds of years. Fortunate old trees that have passed their three thousandth birthday, without injury from lightning, present a mound-like summit of warm, yellow-green foliage, and their colossal shafts are of a beautiful brown color, exquisitely tapered, and branchless to a height of a hundred and fifty feet. Younger trees have darker, bluish foliage, and shoot up with tops comparatively sharp.
The Calaveras Grove is the northmost, and was discovered first of all. It may be visited by tourists to the valley by way of Milton, Murphy's Camp, and Big Oak Flat, though it is not on any of the roads leading directly to Yosemite. The flowery leafiness of this grove is one of its most charming characteristics. Lilies, violets, and trientales cover the ground along the bottom of the glen, and carpets of the blooming chamoebatia are outspread where the light falls free, forming a beautiful ground of color for the brown sequoia trunks; while rubus, dogwood, hazel, maple, and several species of ceanothus make a shaggy underbrush in the cooler shadows.
Most of the larger trees have been slightly disfigured by names carved and painted on marble tablets and countersunk into the bark, and two have been killed; one of them by removing the bark in sections to be set up in the London exposition, the other felled because somebody wanted to dance upon the stump, and the noble monarch now lies a mass of ruins. With these exceptions, the grove has been well preserved, that is, let alone, the underbrush and smaller plants in particular retaining their primitive wildness unimpaired.
travelers to the valley, by way of Big Oak Flat, pass through the small Tuolumne Grove of Big Trees on the dividing ridge between the waters of the Tuolomne and Merced rivers. Those who take the Raymond route may visit the Mariposa and Fresno groves, by stopping over a day at Clark's Station. While those who choose the Coulterville route will pass through the Big Tree Grove of the Merced. These groves on the different routes are not equally interesting to most people, but all contain giants that are worthy representatives of their race. The traveler, however, who would see sequoia gigantea in all its glory, must visit the forests of the Kaweah and Tule rivers.
From the Big Tree groves the roads conduct for a few hours through forests of sugar-pine and silver-fir which become yet more beautiful and interesting as you advance. Then, looking and admiring as best you can while being rapidly whirled onward through dust in a coach drawn by six horses, Yosemite Valley comes suddenly into view, and in an hour you are down the nerve-trying grade--out of the shadows from the noblest forest trees in the world, into the midst of the grandest rocks and waterfalls. Riding up the valley through stately groves, and around the margin of emerald meadows, the lofty walls on either hand looming into the sky with their marvelous wealth of architectural forms, bathed in the purple light of evening, and beating time to the tones of the falls, the whole seems a work of enchantment.
The first object to catch the eye on entering the valley is the Bridal Veil Fall, 900 feet in height--a soft, delicate-looking thing of beauty, as seen at a distance of a mile or two, pouring its snowy folds and irised spray with the utmost gentleness, while the wind sways it from side to side like a downy cloud. But on a near approach it manifests the speed and wild ungovernable energy of an avalanche.
On the other side of the valley, almost immediately opposite the Bridal Veil, there is another fine fall, considerably wider at times when the snow is melting, and more than a thousand feet in height from the brow of the cliff where it first leaps free into the air to the head of a rocky talus, where it strikes and is broken up into ragged cascades. It is called the Ribbon Fall or Virgin's Tears. During the spring floods it is a magnificent object, but the suffocating blasts of spray that fill the recess in the wall which it occupies prevent a near approach. In autumn however, when its feeble current falls in a shower it may then pass for tears with the sentimental onlooker fresh from a visit to the Bridal Veil. Just beyond these two falls are the grand outstanding masses of the Cathedral and El Capitan rocks, 2,700 and 3,300 feet in height, the latter making a most imposing display of sheer, enduring, unflinching granite, by many regarded as the most sublime feature of the valley. Then the Three Brothers present themselves--a vast mountain building of three gables, the highest 4,000 feet above the valley floor. On the south side, opposite the Brothers, the Sentinel Rock, 3,000 feet high, stands forward in bold relief like some special monument, gracefully adorned with a beautiful cascade on either side and fringed at its base with spruce and pine.
The general masses of the walls between the more prominent rocks thus far mentioned, are sculptured into a great variety of architectural forms, impossible to describe separately, each fitted to its place in this grand harmony.
Beyond the Three Brothers the Yosemite Fall is at length seen in one grand view throughout its entire length, pouring its floods of snowy rejoicing waters from a height of 2,600 feet down to the groves and green meadows of the valley, bathing the mighty cliffs with clouds of spray, and making them tremble with its deep, massy thunder-tones.
At the head of the valley, now clearly revealed, stands the Half Dome, the loftiest, most sublime and the most beautiful of all the rocks that guard this glorious temple. From a broad, sloping base planted on the level floor of the valley, it rises to a height of 4,750 feet in graceful flowing folds finely sculptured and poised in calm, deliberate majesty. Here the main valley sends out three branches, forming the Tenaya, Merced, and Illilouette canyons. Tracing the Tenaya Canyon from the valley up Tenaya Creek, you have the Half Dome on the right, and the Royal Arches, Washington Column, and the North Dome on the left. Half a mile beyond Washington Column you come to Mirror Lake, lying imbedded in beautiful trees at the foot of Half Dome. A mile beyond the lake the picturesque Tenaya Fall is seen gleaming through the rich leafy forest that fills this portion of the canyon, and to the left of the fall are the Dome Cascades, about a thousand feet in height, filling the canyon with their deep booming roar.
Just above the Tenaya Fall, on the left side, rises the grand projecting mass of Mt. Watkins, with a sheer front of solid granite like El Capitan, and on the right, the lofty wave-like ridge of Clouds Rest, a mile in height.
A little farther up the canyon, you come to the Tenaya Cascades, 700 feet in vertical descent gliding in a showy plume-like ribbon down a smooth incline of bare granite. Above the cascades you pass a succession of less showy cascades and falls, and many small filled-up lake-basins, with charming lily gardens, and groves of pine and silver-fir, set in the midst of waving folds of shining glacier-planed granite and rocks of every form, until, at a distance of about ten miles from the valley, the canyon opens into the beautiful basin of Lake Tenaya, and the noble Cathedral Peak, with its many spires on the east, towers above it.
The Illilouette Canyon, through which the beautiful Illilouette basin is drained, is about two miles long. From different standpoints in its rough, boulder-choked bottom, a series of most telling and strangely varied views of the head of the valley may be obtained. The Illilouette Fall, near the head of the canyon, is one of the most interesting in the valley. It is nearly 600 feet high, but is seldom visited on account of the roughness of the way leading to it over the rocks. The canyon of the main middle branch of the river extends back to the axis of the range in the Lyell Group, and contains so many waterfalls, cascades of every kind, lakes, and beautiful valleys with walls that are sculptured like those of Yosemite, that nothing like a complete description of it can be given here.
About a mile up the canyon from the main valley, along the margin of wild dashing rapids charmingly embowered, you come to the beautiful Vernal Fall, 400 feet in height. At the head of the fall lies the small Emerald Pool, and a mile beyond, the snowy Nevada Fall is seen, which, next to the Yosemite, is the grandest of all. It is about 600 feet in height, and on account of its waters being so tossed and beaten before reaching the brink of the precipice it is intensely white; while all the way down to the head of the Vernal Fall the river forms a continuous chain of cascades and rapids, hardly less interesting to most travelers than the falls. The majestic rock called, from its shape, the Liberty Cap, rises close alongside the Nevada, adding greatly to the grandeur of the view.
Tracing the river back from the head of the fall, you pass through