Grove Karl Gilbert, the Man 



393 



humor and good fellowship at the campfire. But if a personal 

 digression may be permitted, I would like to refer briefly to a 

 trip we enjoyed together in the High Sierra in the summer of 

 1903, in the course of which he pointed out a multitude of fea- 

 tures of geological significance and glacial sculpture that had 

 escaped my observation during previous field-work in the re- 

 gion; while reciprocally I was able to bring to his attention 

 certain habits of the rock coney and of a rare animal of the 

 genus Aplodontia, that greatly excited his interest. 



From the towering summit of Mt. Conness, reached at 8 130 

 in the morning after a cold night in our sleeping-bags among 

 the timber-line mats of dwarf white-bark pine high up on the 

 mountain side, we enjoyed a prospect of singular glory. The 

 atmosphere was unusually clear, the smoke-haze of the lower 

 country having not yet arisen. We looked out upon a broken 

 sea of cold gray granite whose peaks, domes, and ridges 

 stretched from the Matterhorn to Mt. Galen Clark, and from 

 the splendid ramparts of Tenaya and Yosemite to the lofty 

 crowns of Lyell and Ritter ; while to the east, though the wa- 

 ters of Mono Lake were hidden by the crest of the Sierra, the 

 magnificent chain of volcanic cones known as Mono Craters 

 was in full view, and beyond, in the far distance, arose the 

 lofty Desert Ranges of Nevada. It was an inspiring picture — 

 one that rekindled Gilbert's youthful enthusiasm and tempted 

 him to remain; but the rising wind, making the descent dan- 

 gerous, forced a retreat before the morning was half spent. 



Gilbert's description of another scene, though in a remote 

 part of the west, is so to the point — so appreciative, so full of 

 feeling, so suggestive of the man and of the emotions he must 

 have had when standing on the summit of Conness — that its 

 introduction here seems most fitting. It runs thus : 



''One summer afternoon, 35 years ago, I rode along a high 

 plateau in southern Utah. My companions were Hoxie, a 

 young army officer; Weiss, a veteran topographer, who mapped 

 our route as we went; and Kipp, an assistant whose primary 

 duty was to carry a barometer. Not far behind us was a pack- 

 train. We were explorers, studying the geography and geolo- 

 gy of a strange land. About us was a forest of pine and fir, 

 but we rode through a lane of sunlit prairie cradled in a shal- 



