It is impossible to do justice to the canyon after one brief journey through it; impossible to set down in order the details of that day's travel and the next, confused as they were by the consciousness of tired muscles and eyes bewildered by the all too hurried succession of interests. Little more than impressions remain—memories of cliffs rising from three to five thousand feet above us; of a walk of half a mile on stepping stones along the river; of more talus-piles; of the entrance into the rattlesnake zone; of a walk through a still forest of tall firs and young cedars, where our voices seemed to break the silence of ages; of more talus-piles; of a camp beneath the firs among deep fern-beds, and of the red ants that there congregated; of more brush and more talus-piles; of a look down Muir Gorge and a hot climb up a thousand feet over the rocks to the cairn of stones containing the precious register; of a cliff extending to the river's edge which presented the alternative of edging across it on a crack or climbing a five-hundred-foot hill to get around it.
The Tuolumne is one of the largest of our Sierra rivers, much greater in volume than its quieter neighbor, the Merced. Its falls, often of an imposing height, are none of them sheer, none of them giving that impression of pure joy of living with which the Merced waters leap into the great Nevada abyss. For the Tuolumne's is a sterner, stormier course, beset with giant rocks against which even its splendid strength is impotently hurled, and its joy is the joy of battles. But it is a strange thing, standing beside one of these giant cataracts where the ground shakes with the impact and where every voice of wind or living creature is silenced in the roar of the maddened waters, to see under what a delicate fabric this Titan's force is veiled—a billowing, gossamer texture, iris-tinted, with jeweled spray flying high upon the wind.
Then came Hetch-Hetchy, after two days of strenuous pursuit of the Tuolumne's galloping waters.
When we were there Hetch-Hetchy was a valley untrammeled, carpeted with grass and flowers, walled by mighty cliffs, traversed by the unfettered Tuolumne. Of late, as all the outdoor world knows, its freedom has been bartered and its fate sealed—the fate of being drowned beneath a reservoir whose waters are to quench the thirst of San Francisco. Probably, from an engineering standpoint, the knell of Hetch-Hetchy is a masterpiece; perhaps economically it is wisdom; but none who have delighted in the valley's hospitality but deem it tragedy of the darkest die.
Be that as it may, the waters are yet unstored and Hetch-Hetchy is still a camp-ground, and for the city-bred or the city-weary it offers panacea beyond compare as it has since the beginning of all things, when cities were as little thought of as reservoirs. Regarding the horrors of industrial civilization, William Morris once urged humanitarian effort "until the contrast is less disgraceful between the fields where the beasts live and the streets where men live." And Hetch-Hetchy, even in a region of loveliness, is perhaps Nature's strongest sermon in her wordless arraignment of the physical follies of civilization—at least that so-called civilization which is wound around with unashamed artificialities and the ugliness of urban existence.
Our week in Hetch-Hetchy we wished might have been a month, but the calendar moves relentlessly in the Sierra as elsewhere, and only too soon the days were numbered until we must abandon Yosemite Park and strike southward into other mountain regions, with other companionship. So back we "hiked" to our valley base camp, rescued what the bears had left of our stored property, and renewed acquaintance with the railroad at Merced.
During the rest of that most excellent summer my fortunes were thrown in with those of the Sierra Club, the Californian member of the Coast's trio of notable mountain-climbing organizations, the other two being the Mazamas of Portland and the Mountaineers of Seattle.
Sunrise at Hetch-Hetchy
The Government road that leads to Mount Rainier