96 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



hollows of the summit mountains not far from 

 the glaciers, the highest lying at an elevation of 

 from eleven to nearly twelve thousand feet above 

 the sea. The whole number in the Sierra, not 

 counting the smallest, can hardly be less than 

 fifteen hundred, of which about two hundred 

 and fifty are in the park. From one standpoint, 

 on Red Mountain, I counted forty-two, most' of 

 them within a radius of ten miles. The glacier 

 meadows, which are spread over the filled-up 

 basins of vanished lakes and form one of the 

 most charming features of the scenery, are still 

 more numerous than the lakes. 



An observer stationed here, in the glacial 

 period, would have overlooked a wrinkled mantle 

 of ice as continuous as that which now covers the 

 continent of Greenland; and of all the vast 

 landscape now shining in the sun, he would 

 have seen only the tops of the summit peaks, 

 rising darkly like storm-beaten islands, lifeless 

 and hopeless, above rock-encumbered ice waves. 

 If among the agents that nature has employed 

 in making these mountains there be one that 

 above all others deserves the name of Destroyer, 

 it is the glacier. But we quickly learn that de- 

 struction is creation. During the dreary centu- 

 ries through which the Sierra lay in darkness, 

 crushed beneath the ice folds of the glacial win- 

 ter, there was a steady invincible advance toward 

 the warm life and beauty of to-day; and it is 



