The cascades of the Yosemite Park are among the finest on earth. The Bridal Veil is like a shower of lace or mist and is called "the birthplace of the rainbow," because there are so many rainbows playing in the spray. One of the cascades is called by the queer Indian name of Lung-oo-too-koo-ya. The Yosemite Falls would make Niagara seem like a dwarf so far as height is concerned, though a much larger volume of water flows over the rocks at Niagara than at Yosemite Falls.
Today we Berry Wagon Boys have seen the oldest living thing. It began to grow at least 2000 years before Christ was born, and will probably be living thousands of years from now. If it could talk, it could tell wonderful stories of things it saw when the world was young, but it can only stand and wave its arms gently when the wind blows, for it is just a tree. It stands with many other giant cedar trees in Sequoia Park, California, and until a hunter discovered it in 1879, probably no white man had ever seen it. This hunter named the tree "General Sherman," and it surely looks like the commanding officer of this huge tree regiment. It is a sequoia tree 279 feet high and so large that twenty men standing with outstretched arms can just reach around it.
The Grizzly Giant, the biggest sequoia in Yosemite Park, is much more shaggy-looking and battered than the general, and its heart has been eaten out by fire, but it is a brave old giant and keeps right on living in spite of that painful accident.
The sequoias are named after Sequoyah, a Cherokee Indian who invented an alphabet and a written language for his tribe. These trees will surely "keep his name green" long after any other monument would have turned to dust. The sequoias are sometimes called "the Methuselahs of the forest," but that old Bible character only lived to be 969 years old, and these giant trees are mere babies at that age.
We boys think the sequoia forest the most solemn place we were ever in. The trees tower up so high above you and make you feel so sort of small and new and useless! Then there is scarcely a sound, and you cannot hear your own footsteps on the soft carpet of pine needles.
It seems dreadful to cut down trees which have been growing so long, yet occasionally one is made into lumber. After standing for a thousand years or more in the forest, it must seem strange to be cut into sections, loaded on flat cars, and started on a journey to some distant place to be made into ship masts or furniture or some other thing of which the tree never dreamed when it stood in its home on the slope of the Sierras.
The Grand Canyon of Arizona does not look like a real place. It seems like a place for giants, everything is so huge and wonderful. It is as though some great giant had dug his house out of solid rock. He did not make the walls smooth, but chiseled them out in strange shapes like castles and towers and temples, and he made the sides so steep that for thousands of years no human being dared to go down into his cellar. Instead of leaving the walls gray, he stained them with purples and pinks and browns and reds, and yellows, so that Joaquin Miller, the California poet, called the Grand Canyon a "paint pot 218 miles long and 15 miles wide." Our giant was a thirsty old fellow, so he let the Colorado river flow through his cellar. When you stand on the rim of the canyon, the river looks like a little thread of silver ribbon, but if you were to descend 6000 feet, you would discover that the Colorado is a wild, dashing, terrible river—so wild that only a few men have ever tried to launch their boats on it, and some of those few have lost their lives in the attempt.
The Indians found several trails leading into the canyon, but they did not tell their secret to the pale-face. However, when the white men did discover the trails, they spread the good news and now you can go to the very rim of the canyon in a Pullman car, can stay at a splendid hotel, and can make the descent to the bottom of the canyon in perfect safety, for there are guides to lead the way and sure-footed little donkeys to carry you. The "hurricane deck" of one of these mules is not the most comfortable place to spend a day, but the views one gets on the trip are worth all the trouble. These pictures can only give you a faint idea of the wonders of the Grand Canyon.