The air around my Sunday mountain in June is dry, bland, and fragrant; a full sunlight ripens it to a perfect temperature, giving you at once stimulus and rest. You sleep in it without fear of dew, and no excess of hot or cold breaks up the even flow of balmy delight. You see the wild tulips open, and watch wind-ripples course over slopes of thick-standing grass-blades. Birds, so rare on plains or pine-hills, here sing you their fullest, and enjoy with you the soft, white light, or come to see you in your chosen shadow and bathe in your spring.
Mountain oaks, less wonderful than great, straight pines, but altogether domestic in their generous way of reaching out low, long boughs, roofing in spots of shade, are the only trees on the Pacific slope which seem to me at all allied to men; and these quiet foot-hill summits, these islands of modest, lovely verdure floating in an ocean of sunlight, lifted enough above San Joaquin plains to reach pure, high air and thrill your blood and brain with mountain oxygen, are yet far enough below the rugged wildness of pine and ice and rock to leave you in peace, and not forever challenge you to combat. They are almost the only places in the Sierras impressing me as rightly fitted for human company. I cannot find in wholesale vineyards and ranches dotted along the Sierra foot anything which savors of the eternal indigenous perfume of home. They are scenes of speculation and thrift, of immense enterprise and comfort, with no end of fences and square miles of grain, with here and there astounding specimens of modern upholstery, to say nothing of pianos with elaborate legs and always discordant keys; but they never comfort the soul with that air of sacred household reserve, of simple human poetry, which elsewhere greets you under plainer roofs, and broods over your days and nights familiarly.
Here on these still summits the oaks lock their arms and gather in groves around open slopes of natural park, and you are at home. A cottage or a castle would seem in keeping, nor would the savage gorges and snow-capped Sierras overcome the sober kindliness of these affectionate trees. It is almost as hard now, as I write, to turn my back on Mount Bullion and descend to camp again, as it was that afternoon in 1866.
Evening and supper were at hand, Hoover having achieved a repast of rabbit-pie, with salad from the Italian garden near at hand. It added no little to my peace that two obese squaws from the neighboring rancheria had come and squatted in silence on either side of our camp-fire, adding their statuesque sobriety and fire-flushed bronze to the dusky, druidical scene.
To be welcomed at White and Hatch’s next evening was reward for our dusty ride, and over the next day’s familiar trail we hurried to Clark’s, there again finding friends who took us by the hand. Another day’s end found us within the Yosemite, and there for a week we walked and rode, studied and looked, revisiting all our old points, lingering hours here and half-days there, to complete within our minds the conception of this place. My chief has written so fully in his charming Yosemite book of all main facts and details that I would not, if I could, rehearse them here.
What sentiment, what idea, does this wonder-valley leave upon the earnest observer? What impression does it leave upon his heart?
From some up-surging crag upon its brink you look out over wide expanse of granite swells, upon whose solid surface the firs climb and cluster, and afar on the sky line only darken together in one deep green cover. Upward heave the eastern ridges; above them looms a white rank of peaks. Into this plateau is rent a chasm; the fresh-splintered granite falls down, down, thousands of feet in sheer, blank faces or giant crags broken in cleft and stair, gorge and bluff, down till they sink under that winding ribbon of park with its flash of river among sunlit grass, its darkness, where, within shadows of jutting wall, cloud-like gather the pine companies, or, in summer opening, stand oak and cottonwood, casting together their lengthening shadow over meadow and pool. The falls, like torrents of snow, pour in white lines over purple precipice, or, as the wind wills, float and drift in vanishing film of airy lacework.
Two leading ideas are wrought here with a force hardly to be seen elsewhere. First, the titanic power, the awful stress, which has rent this solid table-land of granite in twain; secondly, the magical faculty displayed by vegetation in redeeming the aspect of wreck and masking a vast geological tragedy behind draperies of fresh and living green. I can never cease marvelling how all this terrible crush and sundering is made fair, even lovely, by meadow, by wandering groves, and by those climbing files of pine which thread every gorge and camp in armies over every brink; nor can I ever banish from memory another gorge and fall, that of the Shoshone in Idaho, a sketch of which may help the reader to see more vividly those peculiarities of color and sentiment that make Yosemite so unique.
The Snake or Lewis’s Fork of the Columbia River drains an oval basin, the extent of whose longer axis measures about four hundred miles westward from the base of the Rocky Mountains across Idaho and into the middle of Oregon, and whose breadth, in the direction of the meridian, averages about seventy miles. Irregular chains of mountains bound it in every direction, piling up in a few places to an elevation of nine thousand feet. The surface of this basin is unbroken by any considerable peak. Here and there, knobs, belonging to the earlier geological formations, rise above its level; and, in a few instances, dome-like mounds of volcanic rock are lifted from the expanse. It has an inclination from east to west, and a quite perceptible sag along the middle line.
In general outline the geology of the region is simple. Its bounding ranges were chiefly blocked out at the period of Jurassic upheaval, when the Sierra Nevada and Wahsatch Mountains were folded. Masses of upheaved granite, with overlying slates and limestones, form the main materials of the cordon of surrounding hills. During the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods the entire basin, from the Rocky Mountains to the Blue Mountains of Oregon, was a fresh-water lake, on whose bottom was deposited a curious succession of sand and clay beds, including, near the surface, a layer of white, infusorial silica. At the exposures of these rocks in the cañon-walls of the present drainage system are found ample evidences of the kind of life which flourished in the lake itself and lived upon its borders. Savage fishes, of the garpike type, and vast numbers of cyprinoids, together with mollusks, are among the prominent water-fossils. Enough relics of the land vegetation remain to indicate a flora of a sub-tropical climate; and among the land-fossils are numerous bones of elephant, camel, horse, elk, and deer.