Down Tenaya Canon. 



view all around. It was a most acceptable and cheerful 

 change when added to the sunshine. 



My experiences from nine in the morning to four in 

 the afternoon, high up on that gorge wall, out of sight 

 and sound of the stream, were various and interesting. 

 As usual, I promptly lost the trail on the granite. I found 

 beautiful flowers and I munched grateful snowcakes and 

 tart manzanita berries, the crabapples of the mountains. 

 I fought the chinquapin and the deer brush for hours, 

 and I suffered many disappointments from ill-chosen, 

 labor-devouring ''short cuts" down the steep, bare, siz- 

 zling granite to some unforeseen precipice and back again, 

 using the sparse scrub-oak brush for a rope or threading 

 my way cautiously along the narrow crevices in the slop- 

 ing, rocky surfaces. If I had followed the rule of keeping 

 high up as the deer usually do I should have saved time 

 and strength and probably have found their trail there. 

 At four in the afternoon I came to a cleared avalanche 

 chute down through the talus and brush and reached 

 what I called "Lost River Valley" and still another rem- 

 nant of a snowbank. Here I soon discovered that I had 

 entered upon the grounds of Mr. Ursus Americanus, but 

 I did not meet his majesty during my short stay. 



In this v/elcome valley, full of cedars and poplars and 

 Douglas spruce, full of fallen tree-trunks and great ferns 

 over six feet high (one I measured was six feet five inches 

 long from ground to tip), full of thimbleberries and 

 prickly, red-cheeked gooseberries as large as blackberries, 

 I walked for nearly half an hour along the white bleached 

 cobbles of a stream bed without seeing a drop of water, 

 though I could plainly hear the river emerging from the 

 narrow defile at the head of the valley, with its usual 

 noisy acclaim. Later I found the water percolating from 

 the sand and gradually accumulating force enough to 

 deserve the name of creek again. 



The view of Mount Watkins from the flat I traversed 

 and from this valley is most impressive, and I believe that 

 this huge, compact granite bulk, thirty-five hundred feet 



