i6o Sierra Club Bulletin. 



the stream, where I assuaged my thirst and took a wel- 

 come plunge into a pool. It is intensely hot in this 

 V-shaped windless oven of the canon in August, when 

 it has been reached by the sun, even if this period is 

 limited to the six and three-quarters hours between 8 145 

 in the morning and 3 130 in the afternoon. 



This bit of a valley I called Talus Valley on account 

 of the enormous size of the blocks and the further 

 mass of evidence of this granite bombardment noticed 

 in the valley above. The vegetation is so dense here, 

 encroaching on the path of the creek as it does, and 

 often overhanging it, that one can only proceed in the 

 narrow bed of the stream — sometimes on the stones, 

 sometimes waist high in the water. Through this thick 

 growth great holes have been torn by these cliff bombard- 

 iers. Hole after hole is seen in the forest at one point 

 here under a sort of chute, down which the winter's ava- 

 lanches seem to be launched for their 2000-foot almost 

 vertical rush. This phenomenon is not due to the spring 

 floods, as the tops of the trees all point at right angles to 

 the stream and not down stream, the direction the flowing 

 water would have turned them. 



In many cases the force that tore these trees from their 

 foundations carried them so high up on the opposite bank 

 that the river even at its flood did not touch them. In this 

 little oasis in the canon I saw three generous masses of 

 snow remaining from last winter's fall, but I could 

 reach only one of them through the impenetrable brush. 



Near my camp, where, by the way, I had a fine fir- 

 balsam bed, I noticed a three-foot granite cobble weather- 

 beaten to a brown color by old age, worn round by long 

 life in the river bed and yet broken in two as neatly as 

 one would crack a boy's marble with a hammer on an 

 anvil. The interior surface was as fresh as if it had been 

 opened an hour before. The blow that divided that 

 cobble would have made short work of a geologist. 



From here the depth of the canon, instead of being 

 from fifteen hundred to two thousand feet, becomes 



