Sierra Club Bulletin. 



a fifty-foot lone monticola pine; thence through a broad, 

 desolate field of dazzling white talus blocks and a patch 

 of tall brush to a point well down the canon and directly 

 above where the vegetation creeping up from below has 

 nearly met the growth reaching down from above ; thence 

 zigzagging down along the crevices in the rock to the 

 brush below. By stopping on the way at an isolated, 

 conspicuous, twenty-five-foot-diameter, spherical granite 

 boulder, left possibly thousands of years ago by the retreat- 

 ing glacier, poised on the edge of the gorge above the 

 brink of the falls, one gets the best general views of the 

 whole canon trip. 



Sitting in the shade of this feldspar, crystal-studded 

 monument, the Half Dome, eighty-nine hundred feet 

 high, is in full view ahead on the east side of the cafion, 

 with Mount Watkins, eighty-five hundred feet, on the 

 west and Sentinel Dome, eighty-two hundred feet, in the 

 center background of the picture. All these peaks are 

 high, high above the tramper's prospective route down 

 the awful prehistoric glacier's ground-out and polished 

 groove in the solid granite where the river has vanished 

 altogether from sight into the cation's confined and ap- 

 parently bottomless depths. Gazing down that narrow, 

 forbidding gorge from here a nervous soul might think 

 that it looked like a picture by Gustave Dore of the 

 Valley of the Shadow of Death painted for Dante's "In- 

 ferno" or Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," so abysmal and 

 impassable does it appear. An additional grisly touch 

 of realism was given to this picture one day later in the 

 trip when, after a particularly exhausting experience, as 

 I lay stretched out resting, high up on one side of the 

 gorge I saw an unwelcome company of five black, soul- 

 less buzzards slowly drifting down the usually birdless 

 and deserted cafion. They floated down in disordered 

 array on the other side, and hundreds of feet below me, 

 like a band of villainous looking vagabonds bent on a 

 purpose better imagined than described. 



