The Mountaineer 47 
confusion pass unnoticed by their majestic crowns; fires that 
exterminate the lesser forests leave the sequoias unharmed. 
The marks of many a conflict with this dread destroyer scar 
their massive boles, it is true; but so seldom does forest fire 
or lightning fell one of these noble trees, that we, whose lives 
are of such brief span, thinking of the cycles that have passed 
them by may almost class them among the immortals. 
Just bevond the sequoia forest, at an altitude of about 
7,000 feet, lay Quail Flat, the camp for the night. There was 
little at first glance to recommend it beyond the solemn wel- 
come of Charley Tuek, the incomparable Chinaman who has 
been our chef on every outing, and the ingratiating grins of 
his five heathen assistants, tenderfeet all, for Charley Tuck 
brooks no rivals and never engages a popular assistant the 
second time. Dunnage bags were quickly unpacked, dinner 
was despatehed, and soon we were ready for the first night 
under the stars. 
Tramping began the next day. <A rise of a few hundred 
feet took us out of the zone of the pines into a red fir forest, 
then through a long stretch of tamarack-pines where a stream 
ran brightly between grassy banks, till the trail plunged down 
hill into the canyon of Boulder Creek. Here many of us 
lunched and then it was upward again, among meadows where 
larkspur and daisies were blooming, to Horse Corral Meadow 
where a beautiful camp was made among the Jeffrey pines. 
A short hour’s walk in the morning brought us to the brink 
of the Kings River Canyon, one of the huge, glacier-carved 
canyons of the Sierra, of structure similar to that of the 
Yosemite Valley, Hetch Hetchy, or the Kern. Some of us 
climbed the few hundred feet to Lookout Point, gaining thereby 
a splendid view of the great mountains to the north and east 
that we were later to climb. The rest of us hastened down 
the 3,000-foot drop to the canyon floor. Every now and then, 
between the spreading arms of the sugar pines, we glimpsed 
the distant ranges of snowy mountains. Later, when the 
growing canyon walls shut out the far horizon, we looked 
down on the valley floor where the pigmy trees dotted the 
meadows in tiny splotches of dark green and the river wound 
among them a narrow ribbon of silver. Down to the river at 
last—how our knees did ache! A long descent is worse than 
a climb when muscles are soft with the winter’s idling. The 
