In the Sierra 



of our blankets. Tamarack Creek is icy cold, 

 delicious, exhilarating champagne water. It 

 is flowing bank full in the meadow with 

 silent speed, but only a few hundred yards 

 below our camp the ground is bare gray 

 granite strewn with boulders, large spaces 

 being without a single tree or only a small 

 one here and there anchored in narrow 

 seams and cracks. The boulders, many of 

 them very large, are not in piles or scattered 

 like rubbish among loose crumbling debris 

 as if weathered out of the solid as boulders 

 of disintegration; they mostly occur sin- 

 gly, and are lying on a clean pavement on 

 which the sunshine falls in a glare that con- 

 trasts with the shimmer of light and shade 

 we have been accustomed to in the leafy 

 woods. And, strange to say, these boulders 

 lying so still and deserted, with no moving 

 force near them, no boulder carrier any- 

 where in sight, were nevertheless brought 

 from a distance, as difference in color and 

 composition shows, quarried and carried and 



