292 



The IVild Sheep of the Sierra. 



ain-dwellers, earth- 

 born companions, 

 and fellow-mortals ? 

 It was afternoon 

 when I joined them, 

 and the glorious 

 landscape faded in 

 the gloaming before 

 awoke from their enchantment. Then 



WILLIAMSON SPRUCE TREE. 



I sought a camp-ground on the river-bank, 

 made a cupful of tea, and lay down to 

 sleep on a smooth place among the yellow 

 leaves of an aspen grove. Next day, I 

 discovered yet grander landscapes and 

 grander life. Following the curves of the 

 river, over huge, swelling rock-bosses, and 

 past innumerable cascades, the scenery in 

 general became gradually more Alpine. 

 The sugar-pine and silver-fir gave place to 

 the hardier cedar and Williamson spruce. 

 The canon walls became more rugged and bare, and gentians and 

 Arctic daisies became more abundant in the gardens and strips of 

 meadow along the streams. Toward the middle of the afternoon I 

 came to another valley, strikingly wild and original in all its features, 

 and perhaps never before touched by human foot. As regards area 

 of level bottom-land, it is one of the very smallest of the San Joaquin 

 Yosemites, but its walls are sublime in height, rising at a bound into 

 the thin sky two to four thousand feet above the river. At the head 

 of the valley the main canon forks, as is found to be the case in all 

 Yosemites. The formation of this one is due to the action of two 

 vast ice-rivers, whose fountains lay to the eastward, on the flanks of 

 Mounts Humphrey and Emerson, and a cluster of nameless peaks 

 farther south. On the slow recession of those rock-grinding glaciers, 

 at the close of the Glacial Period, this valley basin came to light: 

 first a lake, then a sedgy meadow, then, after being filled in with 

 flood and avalanche bowlders, and planted with trees and grasses, it 

 became the Yosemite of to-day — a range for wild sheep and wild 

 men. 



