144 



Sierra Club Bulletin. 



BOOK REVIEWS. 



Edited by Marion Randall Parsons. 



"YosEMiTE Trails." A book sure to capture the interest of 

 Sierra Club members is "Yosemite Trails,"* 

 by J. Smeaton Chase. Those of us who have traveled these trails 

 will take delight in renewing our memories of the "dim alleys 

 of forest and aching white rock-highways ; ghostly snow-glimmer 

 by starlight ; peaks in solemn rank against the sky" ; while to those 

 of us to whom the great park is still unknown ground, no better 

 introduction could be offered. Interesting as the earlier portions 

 of the book are, the chapters on the Vosemite cannot compare 

 with those devoted to the High Sierra. Once Mr. Chase has set 

 his feet upon the higher trails his narrative swings into a brisker 

 pace and evinces a keener delight in the many joys that go to 

 make up a Sierra day. As must almost inevitably be the case 

 where the author's acquaintance with the country is of so brief 

 a character, a few inaccuracies have crept in, such as in attribu- 

 ting the destruction of the tamarack pines along the Tuolumne 

 watershed to forest fires; but these are mostly of minor im- 

 portance and by no means to be weighed against the book's real 

 worth. As a guide book, however, it hardly fulfills the author's 

 ambition, for his amusing account of his wanderings among 

 unknown and unidentified canons could give little light to a puz- 

 zled wayfarer in that least known portion of the Yosemite Park, 

 the northeastern. The rest of Mr. Chase's journeyings took him 

 over the main-traveled trails of the region. Wawona and Hetch 

 Hetchy, the Pohona Trail, Lake Tenaya and Bloody Canon, even 

 Donohoe Pass, all are familiar ground to many more hundreds 

 of people than probably Mr. Chase imagines. The great value of 

 his book lies in the charm of its descriptive passages, the keen 

 appreciation of all that is beautiful and uplifting in our mountain 

 world, and, greatest of all, the interest it is bound to awaken 

 among its readers in "this great Californian range, . . . with its 

 superb features of mountain, forest, river, glacier, lake and 

 meadow, and lying under a climate of unequaled regularity and 

 perfection," which in the time to come, the author believes, "will 

 be the playground of America." M. R. P. 



* Yosemite Trails. By J. Smeaton Chase. Houghton, Mifflin Company, 

 Boston and New York, 191 1. 354 pages, with illustrations from photo- 

 graphs, and a map. Price, $2.00 net. 



