24 



Sierra Club Bulletin. 



ceeded this pandemonium, while fingers were busy with 

 shoe laces and the bewildering intricacies of packing. 

 Before the last novice had crammed his belongings into 

 his dunnage bag most of us had finished breakfast and 

 started on the trail. 



Wishing to avoid the high passes of Farewell Gap and 

 Coyote Pass, which wrought such havoc among pack- 

 mules and tenderfeet five years ago, we this year chose 

 the trail to the Kern leading from the Springville road 

 past Nelson's and over the ridge to Fish Creek and the 

 little Kern. 



Our first night's camp was situated a couple of miles 

 below Nelson's in a grassy cafion wooded with oaks and 

 a few pines. Passing the little settlement with its neat 

 orchards and brown hay-fields, we were soon among the 

 conifers, giant yellow and sugar pines, cedars, and even 

 a group of fine sequoia. 



It was all climbing that morning — from oak and chap- 

 arral to pines and bear clover; to forests of silver fir 

 and red fir, whose carpet of brown needles was bright- 

 ened here and there by the flash of a red snow plant ; to 

 clear streams bordered with mimulus and columbine run- 

 ning through green meadows where the cyclamen bloom- 

 ed; and higher still to the silent tamarack country with 

 its marvelously blue sky and its trail of white granite 

 sand. Here we had done with climbing and could swing 

 along a comfortably level trail with an occasional outlook 

 up the canon of the Little Kern to the high mountains at 

 its upper end bounding the well-remembered pass of 

 Farewell Gap. Then it was down, down, down to the 

 valley of Fish Creek, where camp was made for the 

 night. 



An amusing incident of the next day's travel was the 

 fording of the Little Kern, the more cautious members 

 laboriously removing high boots and stockings and pick- 

 ing their painful way across the rocky bottom barefoot, 

 while a few of the more enterprising made almost as 

 amusing a picture hopping across on the rocks below 



