Yosemite,
September 17, [1873.]
I am again at the bottom meadow of Yosemite after a most intensely interesting bath among the outer mountains. I have been exploring the upper tributaries of the Cascade and Tamarac streams. And in particular all of the basin of the Yosemite Creek. The present basin of every stream which enters the valley on the north side was formerly filled with ice, which also flowed into the valley, although the ancient ice basins did not always correspond with the present water basins because glaciers can flow up hill. The whole of the north wall of the valley was covered with an unbroken flow of ice, with perhaps the single exception of the crest of Eagle Cliff, and though the book of glaciers gradually dims as we go lower on the range, yet I fully believe that future investigation will show that, in the earlier ages of Sierra Nevada ice, vast glaciers flowed to the foot of the range east of Yosemite and also north and south at an elevation of 9000 feet. The glacier basins are almost unchanged, and I believe that ice was the agent by which all of the present rocks receive their special forms. More of this some other day. Would that I could have you here or in any wild place where I can think and speak! Would you not be thoroughly iced? You would not find in me one unglacial thought. Come, and I will tell you how El Capitan and Tissiack were fashioned. I will most likely live at Black’s Hotel this winter in charge of the premises, and before next spring I will have an independent cabin built, with a special Carr corner where you and the Doctor can come and stay all summer; also I will have a tent so that we can camp and receive night blessings when we choose, and then I will have horses enough so that we can go to the upper temples also. I wish you could see Lake Tenaya. It is one of the most perfectly and richly spiritual places in the mountains, and I would like to preëmpt there. Somehow I should feel like leaving home in going to Hetch Hetchy. Besides, there is room there for many other claims, and it soon will fill with coarse homesteads, but as the winter is so severe at Lake Tenaya, very few will care to live there. Hetch Hetchy is about four thousand feet above sea, while Lake Tenaya is eight. I have been living in these mountains in so haunting, soaring, floating a way that it seems strange to cast any kind of an anchor. All is so equal in glory, so ocean-like, that to choose one place above another is like drawing dividing lines in the sky. I think I answered your last with respect to remaining here in the winter. I can do much of this ice work in the quiet, and the whole subject is purely physical, so that I can get but little from books. All depends upon the goodness of one’s eyes. No scientific book in the world can tell me how this Yosemite granite is put together or how it has been taken down. Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon them for years as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths which are graven so lavishly upon them.
Would that I knew what good prayers I could say or good deeds I could do, so that ravens would bring me bread and venison for the next two years! Then would I get some tough gray clothes the color of granite, so no one could see or find me [words missing] would I reproduce the ancient ice-rivers and [words missing] and dwell with them. I go again to my lessons to-morrow morning. Some snow fell, and bye-and-bye I must tell you about it.
If poor good Melancholia Cowper had been here yesterday morning, here is just what he would have sung:—
The rocks have been washed, just washed in a shower
Which winds in their faces conveyed.
The plentiful cloudlets bemuffled their brows
Or lay on their beautiful heads.
But cold sighed the winds in the fir trees above
And down on the pine trees below,