154 



Sierra Club Bulletin. 



The 1901 article spoke of three chief obstacles: (i) A 

 *''f rightfully steep" precipice (the 1500-foot straight wall 

 of the guide), where the men spent three hard hours 

 descending the vertical wall of the gorge with the indis- 

 pensable help of their fifty feet of rope. (2) "The Final 

 Jumping-of¥ Place," where, at an otherwise absolutely 

 hopeless defile in the canon, after much search they found 

 a narrow ledge passage at the beginning with an over- 

 hanging granite shelf a few feet above, obHging them to 

 go on hands and knees along the face of the gorge far 

 above the hungry rocks of the stream bed, and tapering 

 finally to half the width of a shoe and forty feet long in 

 the almost sheer vertical wall of the chasm. (3) A 

 seventy-foot fall that they only passed by jumping into 

 the limbs of a tall nearby pine tree, and after swinging 

 in the air fifty feet from the ground, climbing hand over 

 hand up the limb to the trunk of the tree and thence to 

 the ground. These extremely interesting problems nat- 

 urally were always in the mind of the present encumbered 

 adventurer until disposed of. 



From Lake Tenaya, but four miles in an air line north- 

 east of Yosemite Valley and nestling prettily at 8141 

 feet elevation in an old glacial basin between Mount 

 Hoffman and Cathedral Peak, on the old Tioga Road 

 toward Tuolumne Meadows, the progress along the bank 

 of the creek is a delightful stroll on a balmy California 

 summer day. In August there is not much water in the 

 stream, and one crosses from side to side on the stepping 

 stones or the tree-trunk bridges, as fancy or conditions 

 dictate. There is practically no underbrush, tall, two- 

 leaf pines alternating with open flowery meadows, where 

 I saw crimson and purple and pink and white castilleias 

 all in the same field, the crimson ones differing from the 

 others apparently only in the shape of the tops of the 

 colored floral bracts, being incised with two notches in 

 the crimson or larger flower, but without notching in the 

 other colored smaller blossoms. 



