Bishop, Piute, Evolution, and Busy Creeks via Muir Pass 279 



French Canon, coming in from the north, joins with Piute the waters 

 of an unnamed lake basin lying beyond the divide just northwest of 

 Desolation Lake. It mouths its way by seven channels into the 

 Piute, and the traveler is wise who sets as his objective the broad 

 meadow on the north bank of the Piute three hundred yards ahead 

 and, ignoring an indifferent trail, mushes through. Campers reported 

 the golden-trout fishing in French Canon splendid and the trail fair. 

 Through the level meadow below the junction the encouraged Piute 

 flows between broader banks. From here one sees, back beyond the 

 junction. Pilot Knob (12,237 ft.) standing guard, a glorious pyra- 

 midal sentinel, another East Vidette. 



For the next three miles the stream course is typical of major 

 canon flows. Then, almost without warning, it begins its flight 

 through a three-mile gorge, and the traveler pushes his animals up 

 and down a winding trail, now toward the creek, now back toward 

 the canon wall — a trail blasted in places through solid rock, but 

 withal a well-made one. The sensation of crossing suspension- 

 bridges over Piute and the South Fork of the San Joaquin, an ex- 

 perience wherein both animals and men are prone to increase their 

 speed to a dog-trot when half across, will be remembered by the 

 members of the 1920 club outing. 



Our feet now trod historic trails. In July, 1895, at a point above 

 Jackass Meadows on the South Fork, Theodore S. Solomons and 

 Ernest C. Bonner (see references below) relegated their pack-ani- 

 mal outfit to another and prepared for the first exploration of the 

 headwaters of the South Fork of the San Joaquin. The South Fork 

 was then represented on the map of the county in which it lies 

 "partly by blank spaces and partly by townships drawn in such a 

 way as to indicate to one made wise by bitter experiences that the 

 topography thus indicated was mythical, and the purported survey 

 of the Land Office fictitious and fraudulent." 



Evolution Creek drops into the South Fork of the San Joaquin 

 at the foot of Emerald Peak, a bright-green mass of highly meta- 

 morphosed sandstone. Solomons says of these falls, "the most strik- 

 ing and magnificent I have ever encountered in the Sierra, excepting 

 only those of the Tuolumne Canon." From McClure Meadows we 

 obtained our first glimpse of the Evolution group of peaks, thrilled 

 with the joy of studying them first-hand, the living models of old 

 photographs. On the excellent Muir National Trail an abrupt climb 



