Pedal and Path: Across the Continent Awheel and Afoot

by George B. Thayer

A description of these other trees might be given, but it would simply be a repetition of wonders. Seeing so many trees all the way up from Murphy’s that, to me, seemed prodigious, when I first reached here the grove did not impress me, but every time I look at them now they appear larger. As in looking from the rear end of a moving train, as soon as the train stops the ties, rails, and everything begin to enlarge in size, apparently, so with these trees, a couple of days of rest has given me a much better idea of their immensity than could be had at first sight.

Distance on the wheel, 2,768 miles.

Chapter XV.

In the Yosemite Valley.

From the Calaveras Big Trees to the Yosemite is one hundred and eight miles, and it took me three days to make the journey. The wheelman, Mr. J. A. Hasley, whom I met the day I reached Denver, who made a good companion on the trip to Pike’s Peak and across the plains to Salt Lake City, and who bore the blazing hot sun of California as far as the Trees, there decided not to continue the trip farther. For several days it was evident he was beginning to lose interest in sight-seeing, after a month’s constant application to it, and when he had the misfortune to lose his purse with something over twenty dollars in it, he decided to get to San Francisco by the quickest and cheapest route, which was by the Stockton boat, an opposition line of steamers taking passengers for ten cents, a distance of one hundred miles. So now I am alone again. The first of the three days’ journey was used up in coasting most of the fifteen miles down to Murphy’s, over the same road we had worked so hard in getting up to the Big Trees, and then getting a few miles in a southerly direction beyond the Stanislaus River.

During the afternoon, while riding along on the side of a high hill, I passed a sign, which read “500 yards to the Natural Bridge, the world’s greatest wonder, and don’t you forget that.” Believing it to be a fraud of some kind, I left the machine and walked down a steep narrow path to the bottom of a ravine, perhaps 500 feet below the level of the road. Here were two men clearing out the entrance to a cave from which ran a good-sized stream of water. The surroundings looked as if a land-slide had once choked up the ravine, but that the stream of water had finally worked its way through underneath the mass of rocks and earth, and had formed a tunnel perhaps four hundred feet long and twenty or thirty feet high. Water was constantly dripping from the roof of the tunnel, forming stalactites of various sizes and shapes. To more fully impress me with the importance of his discovery, the old bachelor who owned the place, stated that it had taken forty-two millions of years to bring the place into its present form and shape. Whether it had or not, I felt well paid for visiting a place of which I knew nothing until I saw the sign.

The Stanislaus and the Tuolumne Rivers flow down from the Sierras in a westerly direction, and in going southerly from the Big Trees to the Yosemite, one must naturally cross them. The crossing is easy enough; there is no trouble about that. It is getting down to them that causes the trouble, and getting up away from them again. The profile of the route I took resembled an immense letter W. It is a thousand feet down to the Stanislaus River, and twelve hundred or more down to the Tuolumne, and the two rivers are but a few miles apart.

The zigzag road down to the rivers is too steep and dangerous to coast, and once down, walking is the only way up again. When I came to the Tuolumne River, I believe I could have thrown a stone down to the suspension bridge, a thousand feet or more below, and yet it took four miles of walking to get down to it, and after climbing up five miles farther, I could look across the valley about a mile and see where I had been three or four hours before. I would not believe it till I looked, but the thermometer was 105° down at the bridge. Notwithstanding all this there was something about such mountain scenery, combined with the roar of the river so far below, that compensated for the heat and fatigue. Probably half the entire distance between the Trees and the Valley had to be traveled afoot on the hot road, but there is another grand view of the Tuolumne River, and a small grove of big trees to vary the monotony of the last twenty miles of hill climbing.

When we left Sacramento, it was with the vague impression that it was somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty miles to the Yosemite, but the first day out the distance was reduced to below two hundred by some one of whom we made inquiries. We were entirely ignorant of the nearest route, but by making frequent inquiries we kept on, generally in the right direction. The second day the entire distance was further reduced to one hundred and twenty-five miles, then the distance from the Trees to the Valley was put at twenty-five miles by some one who knew it all, but such good news was not lasting, for the very next man who had “traveled over that section,” said it was one hundred and seventy-five miles between the two places.