The Passing of Our Mountain Meadows. 39 



THE PASSING OF OUR MOUNTAIN MEADOWS 



By Harold C. Bradley. 



Photographs by the author. 



Returning to the Sierra after an absence of many years 

 I was struck with the changes which time had wrought 

 in many of our Httle forest-rimmed meadows. My first 

 intimation of the change came as I approached Tam- 

 arack Flat on the way to Yosemite Valley, intending to 

 camp at the lower end of the flat, where ten years ago 

 were open patches and good feed for the horses. That 

 portion of the flat is now a thicket of young tamaracks, 

 almost impenetrable and devoid of grass. Little Yosemite 

 Valley has in the same way lost many of its smaller 

 scattered patches of meadow before the advancing tama- 

 racks, which there have shot up into jungles of slender, 

 worthless lodgepoles such as one finds in many of the 

 mountain regions of the Northwest. Fifteen years ago 

 there was an abundance of feed about the lower cabins 

 at Lake Tenaya ; now one can hardly ride a horse through 

 the mass of little trees which has replaced the sward. In 

 Tuolumne Meadows one not infrequently finds a scat- 

 tered growth of young tamaracks dotting the grass, and 

 occasionally an extended thicket pushing its way out into 

 the open like an advancing flood, killing the grass and 

 thrusting upward with great rapidity for light and air. 

 Where the trees are not numerous enough to have de- 

 stroyed the grass, many of the little meadows have to be 

 cleaned out with an axe before they can be used by a 

 tethered horse. 



From observations in the park this summer I should 

 estimate that we have lost nearly a quarter of the avail- 

 able feed area of the meadows which lie within the large 

 timber belt. At higher levels the loss is much less ; the 

 meadows are larger and more numerous there, and little 

 inconvenience results as yet to the camper. It is only a 



