OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 29 



the Department of the Interior acquired possession of the old Tioga 

 Road, the magnificent country north of the valley was known only 

 to a few enthusiastic mountaineers who went in yearly with camp 

 outfits. The old Tioga Road was built in 1881 to a mine soon after 

 abandoned. Its recent repair by the Government has opened to all 

 one of the finest scenic sections in America, a country dotted with 

 splendid snowy summits, grown with glorious forests, and watered 

 with rushing trout streams. 



And thus is added to the amazing water spectacle for which the 

 valley is famous still another kind of Yosemite waterfall destined 

 to world-wide celebrity. The Tuolumne River, descending sharply 

 to the head of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, becomes, in John Muir's 

 phrase, "one wild, exulting, onrushing mass of snowy purple bloom 

 spreading over glacial waves of granite without any definite channel, 

 gliding in magnificent silver plumes, dashing and foaming through 

 huge bowlder dams, leaping high in the air in wheel-like whirls, dis- 

 playing glorious enthusiasm, tossing from side to side, doubling, 

 glinting, singing in exuberance of mountain energy." The crowning 

 feature of this mad spectacle are the water wheels which rise fifty feet 

 or more into the air when the slanting river strikes obstructions. 



In addition to its many other attractions, the Yosemite National 

 Park contains three groves of sequoias, the celebrated "Big Trees of 

 California." One of these trees, the Grizzly Giant, has a diameter of 

 29.6 feet and a height of 204 feet. 



IX. 

 THE SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK 



Special Characteristic: Largest and Oldest Trees in the World 



AND they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top 

 -£"■*- may reach unto heaven. 



Thus is recorded, in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, the building 

 of the Tower of Babel. While this tower was doubtless still standing, 

 and a hundred years or two before the birth of Abraham, a tiny seed 

 in the warm soil of a mountain slope on quite the opposite side of the 

 world thrust into the light of day a slender green spike which was 

 destined, during an existence of more than four thousand years, to 

 become itself a lofty tower; noble in form, "with a physiognomy 

 almost Godlike," as John Muir puts it, pulsating with life to its top- 

 most leaflet more than three hundred feet above the ground, and 

 giving forth a babel of bird song to the accompaniment which the 

 summer winds played upon its many millions of tiny leaves. 



On the stump of this prostrate sequoia tree, one of the noblest of 

 the celebrated Big Trees of California, John Muir counted more than 



