A NEAR VIEW OF THE HIGH SIERRA 49 



uplift of the range is one great picture, not clearly 

 divisible into smaller ones ; differing much in this 

 respect from the older, and what may be called, riper 

 mountains of the Coast Eange. All the landscapes 

 of the Sierra, as we have seen, were born again, re 

 modeled from base to summit by the developing ice- 

 floods of the last glacial winter. But all these new 

 landscapes were not brought forth simultaneously ; 

 some of the highest, where the ice lingered longest, 

 are tens of centuries younger than those of the 

 warmer regions below them. In general, the 

 younger the mountain-landscapes, -younger, I 

 mean, with reference to the time of their emergence 

 from the ice of the glacial period, the less sepa 

 rable are they into artistic bits capable of being 

 made into warm, sympathetic, lovable pictures with 

 appreciable humanity in them. 



Here, however, on the head waters of the Tuol- 

 umne, is a group of wild peaks on which the geol 

 ogist may say that the sun has but just begun to 

 shine, which is yet in a high degree picturesque, 

 and in its main features so regular and evenly 

 balanced as almost to appear conventional one 

 somber cluster of snow-laden peaks with gray pine- 

 fringed granite bosses braided around its base, the 

 whole surging free into the sky from the head of a 

 magnificent valley, whose lofty walls are beveled 

 away on both sides so as to embrace it all without 

 admitting anything not strictly belonging to it. 

 The foreground was now aflame with autumn col 

 ors, brown and purple and gold, ripe in the mellow 

 sunshine ; contrasting brightly with the deep, cobalt 

 blue of the sky, and the black and gray, and pure, 



