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Sierra Club Bulletin 



accommodate the numbers. It was finally agreed, however, 

 that twenty should be the Umit of the party, and that for con- 

 venience of commissary and general handling they should be 

 divided into two platoons of ten each. 



And so we set forth, bag and baggage, with the most efficient 

 of packers and five pack animals. The first night found us by 

 our camp fire at Conness Creek, dining on rainbow trout, and 

 afterwards mingling our voices in true Sierra Club fashion in 

 hymns of praise and thanksgiving. On the other side of the 

 creek, Ray Bailey and his Rodgers Lake revelers were making 

 their best efforts to prove that they were the true and only 

 dwellers in the mountains. But they failed. We were it. So 

 we thought and so we still believe. We were off to an un- 

 known land — a valley lying somewhere to the northeast, 

 guessed at, but unknown — and a still more mysterious moun- 

 tain beyond. We had been to Rodgers Lake and knew it by 

 heart. But no one, as far as we knew in the history of the Si- 

 erra Club, had been up Virginia Canon and to Dunderberg. 

 And so with lusty voices we proved our right of primacy far 

 into the night. At last the fire died out and the winds and 

 tumbling streams sang us to sleep. 



The morning of our second day found us still on familiar 

 ground, up Cold Canon and over the ridge following the Mat- 

 terhorn trail as far as Return Creek. Return Creek is the name 

 given to the stream formed by the junction of Spiller and Vir- 

 ginia creeks, so Return Cafion and Virginia Canon are, in fact, 

 geographically one. The same stream heading in Virginia 

 Cafion flows through both. At the point where the main trail 

 crossed the creek we picked up the Virginia Pass trail, running 

 northeasterly and following closely the stream. 



Virginia Cafion is one of the many spots in the Sierra that 

 owe their beauty and charm to what may be called their inti- 

 macy. You leave the rest of the world behind ; you are visit- 

 ing a friend at home, in the seclusion of a quiet beauty that is 

 denied the world in general. To add to its charm you have not 

 only meadows of rare flowers, but on either side the most per- 

 fect tamarack-pine forests that I have seen anywhere. Not a 

 single dead tree up to the very sky-line mars the unbroken 

 sweep of glistening green; and, best of all, the trail, which 



