The Tuolumne Canon. 



2^y 



THE TUOLUMNE CANON. 



By William Frederic Bade. 



In the heart of the Sierra, more than eight thousand 

 five hundred feet (about 2,616 meters) above the level 

 of the Pacific, lies a truly alpine valley familiar to every 

 mountaineer who has visited the regions north of Yo- 

 semite. It is vain now to regret the association of the 

 word ''meadows" with the romantic Indian name 

 Tuolumne. The hunters and prospectors who valued 

 a valley chiefly as an oasis for pack-animals were first 

 at the christening and have succeeded in attaching the 

 name of a common drudge to a queen of the Sierras. 

 Many are the little rivers that know the way to this 

 valley. They are mad little rivers, full of song and fury. 

 Though often hidden in deep gorges, mostly carved 

 through solid granite, they always are heard, now leap- 

 ing a precipice with shouts of thunder, now singing the 

 joys of a gentler career amid ferns and pines. All of 

 them are true Jordans, — ''descenders," — but fortunately 

 none of them, like the Kern, are found dead at the end. 

 Long ago the valley was a famous hunting-ground of 

 the Mono Indians, whose shapely obsidian arrows still 

 dot the ground where in other days they bit the sod. 

 Its upper end, where the Dana and Lyell Forks unite 

 to form the Tuolumne, is an ideal camping-ground. Last 

 summer the Sierra Club chose it a second time as its 

 rendezvous and sent out thence its climbing parties to 

 Dana, Lyell, and Ritter. These mountains, together 



