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Sierra Club Bulletin. 



tinence, for pigmies like ourselves to think of scaling 

 its walls. 



The intervening country, spread maplike before us, 

 gave no promise of easier traveling, so we hastened to 

 leave the pass and plunge down Bench Canon towards 

 the north fork of the San Joaquin. The snow was very 

 soft, making the descent almost as tedious as the ascent. 

 Our course to the river proved to be unexpectedly open, 

 though in one place a treacherous cliff made life seem 

 uncommonly interesting to a couple of pilgrims who 

 strayed off the narrow path of easiest descent; but with 

 no very serious difficulty we at last reached the San 

 Joaquin. This is a beautiful canon, whose dark, reddish 

 walls, rising to a height of four thousand feet, give a 

 wonderful impression of wild, rugged grandeur. Cross- 

 ing the river on a snow bridge we made our way up its 

 eastern bank. The canon is little frequented and we 

 believed ourselves the first to have entered it that season 

 until, a mile or so above our crossing, we came upon a 

 group of burros pensively sunning themselves on a snow- 

 bank, where the winged pests of the meadows were less 

 troublesome. Soon afterwards we found a camp tenanted 

 by one man, a member of a prospecting party which had 

 been at work on a copper claim, high above us on the 

 walls of the Minaret group since April. 



It had been a long, hard day, the hardest that one 

 weary pilgrim had ever undertaken, for we had climbed 

 to an altitude of over eleven thousand feet with our 

 packs on our shoulders besides traversing fifteen miles 

 of the roughest kind of country. So this bright camp- 

 fire looked particularly inviting. The canon was narrow- 

 ing; the high, rocky walls appeared bare of any vegeta- 

 tion, and to the last straggler this seemed to be the 

 logical place to call a halt. But our inexorable leader 

 lifted his eyes to the head of the canon, where the peak 

 of Ritter showed, pointed to a bench beside a water- 

 course nearly a thousand feet above us, where a single 



