THE 192 1 OUTING 



By Julie Mortimer 



THE 192 1 outing saw the return of the club to its private camp 

 at the Soda Springs in Tuolumne Meadows. To many — and 

 among them the writer — this outing was a first experience of camp- 

 ing in the High Sierra, Its story is a record of long happy days in 

 the open air ; of peaks climbed and passes crossed ; of evenings when 

 the afterglow reposed upon mountain and meadow; of nights when 

 the stars shone brilliantly out of the blue depths of a frosty sky; of 

 camp-fires where the music of a violin carried thoughts thousands 

 of miles away to other scenes. These and a hundred other fleeting 

 impressions made up a whole difficult indeed to set down, but un- 

 forgettable to those who were there. 



One afternoon, when the shadow of El Capitan lay across Yosem- 

 ite Valley, we drove through tall incense-cedars and yellow pines to 

 our camp below Mirror Lake. In an open space among the trees 

 the dunnage-bags were piled up waiting for us, and there we had 

 our first meal at commissary, and learned to wear our spoons in our 

 boots and carry our tin cups like Old-Timers. There, too, we spent 

 our first night in the open air and fell asleep with the murmur of 

 Tenaya Creek in' our ears. 



After one day in the Yosemite camp we took the Sunrise Trail, 

 past the magnificent Vernal and Nevada falls, to our one-night camp 

 under the red firs of Sunrise Meadow. Some of the party climbed 

 Half Dome en route, by the new trail and stairway completed two 

 years ago under the auspices of the club, and others took the Clouds 

 Rest Trail, but the majority were content to follow the route out- 

 lined the night before. 



The call was at five next morning, and the chill of dawn in the 

 high altitudes was still in the air when we climbed the flank of Sun- 

 rise Mountain, descended and crossed Tong Meadow, where the 

 mosquitoes gave us a bad quarter of an hour, climbed the slope past 

 Columbia's Finger, and skirted the base of Cathedral Peak, beyond 

 which the trail runs into the Tioga Road and Tuolumne Meadows. 

 Our first view of the meadows was singularly beautiful. A wide 



