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CHAPTER XXIII. 



FISH AND GAME OP THE FOREST RESERVES. 

 Charles Frederick Holder. 



The splendid domain know as the Forest Reserves, reaching from 

 Lake Tahoe on the north along the Sierra Nevada mountains, and in- 

 cluding the ranges ot Southern California to the Mexican line, is a 

 natural park thousands of square miles in extent, embracing features 

 so varied in character that it has become world renewed. Its scenery- 

 is impressive beyond description, and the Sierra Nevada range alone, 

 with its stupendous ravines and gorges, reaching from the land of living 

 glaciers about Mount Dana to the semi-tropical regions of its foothills, 

 is a world in itself. Within its borders are alpine lakes, trout streams 

 and pools six or seven thousand feet above the sea. The black-tailed deer 

 and grizzly wonder through forests of titanic size — a nature's wonder- 

 land. In the heart of this region are rifts, gulches and canyons, so nar- 

 row and abysmal that the light of day rarely reaches into their depths. 

 Here is the home of the receding glacier, and other more ancient giants 

 of snow and ice have left their mark as clearly as the eroding hand of 

 time itself. There are strange contrasts in this natural park. Cliffs 

 a mile high, mountains which in their height and rugged splendor chal- 

 lenge the world; alpine lakes scintillating like gems; streams which 

 flow along the mountain tops, born of winter snows, leaping madly over 

 precipices half a mile high, as in the Yosemite, foaming among the 

 rocks, finally to emerge into the broad valleys of the summerland be- 

 low and flow on amid nodding flowers to the sea. 



The Forest Reserves may be considered the land where the game 

 animals of the State have made their last stand, and where they should 

 find adequate protection. Not fifty years ago, vast herds of elk roamed 

 the Reserves; the antilope covered the San Joaquin and other valleys in 

 bands, while deer and bear were the common animals of nearly the 

 entire region. Now they are so rare that the antelope has almost dis- 

 appeared, the elk is but a memory, and in the extreme southern section 

 the grizzly, the most common animal half a century ago, is only oc- 

 casionally seen. In the inacessible portions of the Sierra Nevadas the 

 grizzly, Ursus horribilis, is still fairly abundant, and the black bear. 



