Sierra Club Bulletin. 



These overwhelming views might have weighed upoa 

 us but for the daily and nightly companionship of the 

 friendly trees of the Sierra forest, pronounced by the two 

 best judges — the renowned and world-experienced botan- 

 ists, Asa Gray and Sir Joseph Hooker — to be the finest 

 coniferous forest in the world, both as to the grandeur of 

 individual trees and the variety of species. What a joy 

 to become better acquainted with them, each on its chosen 

 level — the delicate hemlock, the rugged juniper, the plumy 

 Douglas spruce, the vivid incense cedar, the silver firs, 

 red and white, so exquisite in youth, so majestic in age, 

 and all the family of pines, among them the democratic 

 tamarack, the massive columnar ponderosa, the towering 

 sugar-pine, most impressive of all in its masterful indi- 

 viduality — until at last the Sequoia rose on our sight, 

 ruling over the whole lordly forest in serene majesty. 



But before we came to the Sequoia we had had our 

 second long camp in the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Vivid in 

 my mind is my first view as I looked down into it from 

 its upper end, — the granite walls on each side rising to a 

 height of two thousand feet, the bold cliff "Kolana" stand- 

 ing forth toward the center dominating all, the park-like 

 floor, diversified with meadow and grove, the beautiful 

 Tuolumne River flowing through as the Merced flows 

 through Yosemite Valley. Once in the valley, past a charm- 

 ing five-sprayed waterfall of the stream that opened a way 

 for us, we looked up to see Wapama Fall in its pure 

 white clinging to the north wall for sixteen hundred feet, 

 reminding us of the Yosemite in situation and volume, 

 though not flung free like that peerless fall of all the 

 world. Beside the Wapama Fall, over that same wall, in 

 early summer a thousand-foot single leap is made by the 

 delicate Tueeulala Fall, fairer even than the Yosemite 

 Bridal Veil. Grand and beautiful by day, imagine the 

 spell of this grand canon valley by moonlight ! 



With the perfectly feasible roads that our Government 

 should build in this National park, as it has in the Yellow- 

 stone, uncounted multitudes to come will make the grand 

 circuit of the whole. 



