380 THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA 



full bloom adorned their margins, lilies ten feet high, 

 larkspur, columbines, and luxuriant ferns, leaning 

 and overarching in lavish abundance, while a noble 

 old Live Oak spread its rugged arms over all. Here 

 I camped, making my bed on smooth cobblestones. 



Next day, in the channel of a tributary that 

 heads on Mount San Antonio, I passed about fif 

 teen or twenty gardens like the one in which I 

 slept lilies in every one of them, in the full pomp 

 of bloom. My third camp was made near the middle 

 of the general basin, at the head of a long system of 

 cascades from ten to 200 feet high, one following the 

 other in close succession down a rocky, inaccessible 

 canon, making a total descent of nearly 1700 feet. 

 Above the cascades the main stream passes through 

 a series of open, sunny levels, the largest of which 

 are about an acre in size, where the wild bees and 

 their companions were feasting on a showy growth 

 of zauschneria, painted cups, and monardella ; and 

 gray squirrels were busy harvesting the burs of the 

 Douglas Spruce, the only conifer I met in the basin. 



The eastern slopes of the basin are in every way 

 similar to those we have described, and the same 

 may be said of other portions of the range. From 

 the highest summit, far as the eye could reach, the 

 landscape was one vast bee-pasture, a rolling wil 

 derness of honey-bloom, scarcely broken by bits of 

 forest or the rocky outcrops of hilltops and ridges. 



Behind the San Bernardino Range lies the wild 

 " sage-brush country," bounded on the east by the 

 Colorado River, and extending in a general north 

 erly direction to Nevada and along the eastern base 

 of the Sierra beyond Mono Lake. 



