324 
CALIFORNIA 
tliey are set in this veil by the slant rays of the setting sun, and 
walks through this valley of wonderland six miles long, himself 
wondering whether by some mighty convulsion of nature the 
crust of the earth has fallen sheer down 4,000 feet, cleaving the 
granite on either side as it went, or whether the glaciers have 
plowed and eroded, j)laning and polishing the granite on either 
side, until Yosemite today is one of the sublime spectacles of the 
world. Cathedral s{)ires and domes are there for his worship 
and the meadows are carpeted for his coming. Out of the valley 
a little way he will come upon groves of sequoia, the largest of 
which he will find by actual measurement to be 350 feet high 
and more than 30 feet in diameter. Away to the north in the 
same great Sierra range is mount Shasta, 14,442 feet high, wear- 
ing its eternal mantle of white as if set there as a great white 
throne for the coming judgment of the world. 
Nor does this wealth of the picturesque end here. There is 
the Coast range that rims the great valleys on the ocean side, 
broken here and there, but extending parallel with the Sierra 
for hundreds of miles. For a part of the way there is an inner 
coast range inclosing such beautiful valleys as the Santa Clara, 
Sonoma, and Napa, presenting a series of landscapes that are 
unsurpassed on the Pacific coast for quiet })icturesque effect. 
Here the apricot and the prune come to perfection, and the vine- 
yards that creep up the mountains, in some places to their sum- 
mits, produce the most luscious of all the table grapes that are 
sent late in the season to New York and other eastern markets. 
It is in that part of the Coast range extending from Monterey 
bay to the northern border of Mendocino county (a distance of 
about 300 miles and averaging about 25 miles in breadth) and 
only there in the whole world that the redwood, sequoia semper- 
virens, is found, the first in commercial value of all the trees in 
California and, for the area covered, ])robably the most valuable 
timber tree in the United States. It belongs to the cedar family, 
lacking the ])ungent odor of the white cedar, but surpassing all 
others of this family in symmetry of form and in size, which, in 
some instances, is l)ut little less than the related species, the 
sequoia gif/anlea, which is found nowhere else but on the western 
slope of the Sierra in isolated groves at elevations of from 3,000 
to 5,000 feet. These redwood trees frequently attain an eleva- 
tion of 200 feet and a diameter of from 10 to 12 feet. The aver- 
age is something less. During the past season a redwood tree, 
yielding 48,000 feet of merchantable lumber, or a full cargo for 
