THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE 



thousand feet high, hung here and there with snow- 

 white waterfalls, and supporting the blue sky on 

 domes and pinnacles still higher. Oh, the calmness 

 and majesty of the scene! the evidence of such tre- 

 mendous activity of some force, some agent, and 

 now so tranquil, so sheltering, so beneficent! 



That there should be two or three Yosemites in 

 the Sierra not very far apart, all with the main fea- 

 tures singularly alike, is very significant — as if this 

 kind of valley was latent in the granite of that region 

 — some peculiarity of rock structure that lends 

 itself readily to these formations. The Sierra lies 

 beyond the southern limit of the great continental 

 ice-sheet of late Tertiary times, but it nursed and 

 reared many local glaciers, and to the eroding power 

 of these its Yosemites are partly due. But water was 

 at work here long before the ice — eating down into 

 the granite and laying open the mountain for the 

 ice to begin its work. Ice may come, and ice may 

 go, says the river, but I go on forever. Water tends 

 to make a V-shaped valley, ice a U-shaped one, 

 though in the Hawaiian Islands, where water erosion 

 alone has taken place, the prevailing form of the 

 valleys is that of the U-shaped. Yosemite approxi- 

 mates to this shape, and ice has certainly played a 

 part in its formation. But the glacier seems to have 

 stopped at the outlet of the great valley; it did not 

 travel beyond the gigantic hall it had helped to ex- 

 cavate. The valley of the Merced from the mouth 



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