86 



Sierra Club Bulletin. 



swift, dusty two days' ride which has now gone the way 

 of other stage-rides into the difficult but happy past. 

 We felt very strange in our mountain clothes, with knee- 

 high hob-nailed boots of incredible stoutness, skirts and 

 bloomers to the knee, rough waists and coats, and wide- 

 brimmed sombreros; very strange and most wonderfully 

 free of all conventions and traditions. Our dunnage-bags 

 were loaded on with us, — brown canvas rolls containing 

 fifty pounds — no more — of bedding and clothes for a 

 month of tramping and sleeping in the open. And thus 

 emancipated we sped along through green hot meadows, 

 and around and over the curving foothills; and at last, 

 after noon of the second day, we took our places behind 

 a new driver of Falstaffian humor and proportions, for 

 the final dash into the reservation, and through the gorge 

 of the Merced to the Club's first camp in the wide eastern 

 end of the Valley. 



Our road at first led through rich forests. Insensibly 

 our eyes accepted the girth and stature of great trees — 

 huge yellow pines with their patterned bark, and shaggy- 

 coated cedars; so that we came unaware upon our first 

 sequoias, those vaster giants of an elder world. So simple 

 in their majesty they were, so fit and fine in their im- 

 mensity, that like great men they seemed at first as other 

 folk, dominating us gradually by sheer force and gran- 

 deur. Slowly our eyes measured their girth and height, 

 accepted the mountainous roots, the massive columns, 

 rugged, straight, yet soft-coated as with thick brown 

 furry velvet, against a thousand winters' destructive 

 storms. Gradually our gaze climbed each old trunk bare 

 of boughs to that plume of green away up against the 

 sky; until our imaginations bowed at last to the splendor 

 of this conquest of time and all the elements, to life per- 

 sistent and triumphant through so many centuries, and 

 still facing the future in the power and beauty of eternal 

 youth. 



Only after leaving the two giants did I learn that they 

 were the last on our route. In popular prejudice the 



