Down Tenaya Canon. 



155 



As I wandered along here I stumbled upon a great, 

 gray coyote taking his sun bath as naturally as one of 

 our domestic dogs would. He was so startled at sight 

 of my strange figure that he bolted across the creek in 

 his first haste, sadly bedraggling his long, plumy tail. I 

 came to a dead stop, and when he reached the opposite 

 bank, thirty feet away, he also halted and gave m.e an 

 amusing and almost human look of mingled curiosity 

 and reproach before he buried himself in the forest. In 

 my quiet advance I chanced on many interesting bits of 

 tranquil mountain quail domestic life and found fresh 

 deer tracks all about me. 



Two forty-foot pine trees lying flat on the ground in 

 a meadow, with roots torn from their soil-beds and with 

 many needles still fresh and green, attracted my curiosity. 

 The great boulder standing in front of each and the 500- 

 foot smooth granite toboggan from the top of the nearby 

 dome told the story of a giant game of bowling last 

 winter. In another meadow I found the top of a tamar- 

 ack pine twenty-seven feet long and six inches in diameter 

 at the broken end. An examination of all the trees in 

 sight in the neighborhood failed to reveal one without a 

 top, and, as most of the needles were still green on this 

 fragment, I inferred that a terrific gale had occurred 

 recently and had wrenched this tree-top off and whirled 

 it through the air a long distance to this open meadow. 



About an hour's pleasant walk with the majestic, bare 

 granite domes on every side will take one to the end of 

 Tenaya Lake valley and to the river's notch in the rim 

 of a vast bare-walled glacial amphitheater about a mile 

 long, half a mile wide, from fifteen hundred to two thou- 

 sand feet high and shaped like an enormous porcelain 

 bath-tub with the end removed where the faucets usually 

 are. The creek would make a Silver Apron here if there 

 was enough water for the purpose, and the surface passed 

 over was rough enough to produce the foamy, boisterous 

 effect. As the surface has the glacial plus the aqueous 

 polish, the water merely runs rapidly down the glassy 



