Remember me to the Doctor and all the boys and to McChesney and the brotherhood.
Cordially,
J. Muir.
Independence,
October 16th, 1873.
All of my season’s mountain work is done. I have just come down from Mt. Whitney and the newly discovered mountain five miles northwest of Whitney, and now our journey is a simple saunter along the base of the range to Tahoe, where we will arrive about the end of the month or a few days earlier.
I have seen a good deal more of the high mountain region about the head of Kings and Kern rivers than I expected to do in so short and so late a time.
Two weeks ago I left the Doctor and Billie in the Kings River Yosemite, and set out for Mt. Tyndall and adjacent mountains and cañons. I ascended Tyndall and ran down into the Kern River Cañon and climbed some nameless mountains between Tyndall and Whitney, and thus gained a pretty good general idea of the region. After crossing the range by the Kearsarge Pass, I again left the Doctor and Bill and pushed southward along the range and northward and up Cottonwood Creek to Mt. Whitney, then over to the Kern Cañons again and up to the new “highest” peak, which I did not ascend, as there was no one to attend to my horse. Thus you see I have rambled this highest portion of the Sierra pretty thoroughly, though hastily. I spent a night without fire or food in a very icy wind-storm on one of the spires of the new highest peak by some called Fisherman’s Peak. That I am already quite recovered from the tremendous exposure proves that I cannot be killed in any such manner. On the day previous I climbed two mountains, making over 10,000 feet of altitude.
I saw no mountains in all this grand region that appeared at all inaccessible to a mountaineer. Give me a summer and a bunch of matches and a sack of meal, and I will climb every mountain in the region.
I have passed through the Lone Pine and noted the Yosemite and local subsidences accomplished by the earthquakes. The bunchy bush Compositæ of Owen’s Valley are intensely glorious.
I got back from Whitney this p.m. How I shall sleep! My life rose wavelike with those lofty granite waves; now it may wearily float for a time along the smooth, flowery plain.