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Sierra Club Bulletin. 



with Gibbs, Unicorn, Cathedral, and Conness, form the 

 valley's nearer or remoter periphery, an imposing circle 

 of snowy summits. In the valley, also, the snow lingers 

 far into the summer, but a multitudinous procession of 

 showy spring flowers is constantly treading on the edge 

 of the snow-banks, pushing them up the pine-clad slopes 

 to their last impregnable strongholds. Thence sally forth 

 the six or seven glacier-born streams that join the 

 Tuolumne in and below the Meadows. They make of it 

 a turbulent river that even late in the summer would 

 be dangerous, if not quite impossible, to ford on its foamy 

 speedways. 



Immediately below the Meadows the river plunges 

 into a cafion that deserves to be counted among the 

 greatest natural wonders on earth. For a long time 

 it was considered impassable. In places the walls rise 

 in almost vertical precipices to a height of more than 

 five thousand feet. Though the cafion is scarcely more 

 than thirty miles long, the fall of the river within that 

 distance amounts to five thousand two hundred feet. 

 It would be hard to imagine a wilder career for a river 

 than that upon which the Tuolumne enters during this 

 part of its course. Captain Clarence King, after a futile 

 attempt to follow it through the canon, is said to have 

 pronounced such an undertaking impossible for any 

 "creature without wings." But a few adventurous ex- 

 plorers have traversed it since then, and on the 20th of 

 last July (1904) a party of fourteen men, organized by 

 E. T. Parsons, started on a successful knapsack trip 

 through the cafion. Fortunately all were picked moun- 

 taineers, inured to the wilds, for it proved a strenuous 

 four days' trip full of adventure as well as indescribably 



