From the margin of these glorious forests the first
general view of the Valley used to be gained—a
revelation in landscape affairs that enriches one’s
life forever. Entering the Valley, gazing overwhelmed
with the multitude of grand objects about us, perhaps
the first to fix our attention will be the Bridal
Veil, a beautiful waterfall on our right. Its
brow, where it first leaps free from the cliff, is
about 900 feet above us; and as it sways and sings
in the wind, clad in gauzy, sun-sifted spray, half
falling, half floating, it seems infinitely gentle
and fine; but the hymns it sings tell the solemn fateful
power hidden beneath its soft clothing.
The Bridal Veil shoots free from the upper edge of
the cliff by the velocity the stream has acquired
in descending a long slope above the head of the fall.
Looking from the top of the rock-avalanche talus on
the west side, about one hundred feet above the foot
of the fall, the under surface of the water arch is
seen to be finely grooved and striated; and the sky
is seen through the arch between rock and water, making
a novel and beautiful effect.
Under ordinary weather conditions the fall strikes
on flat-topped slabs, forming a kind of ledge about
two-thirds of the way down from the top, and as the
fall sways back and forth with great variety of motions
among these flat-topped pillars, kissing and plashing
notes as well as thunder-like detonations are produced,
like those of the Yosemite Fall, though on a smaller
scale.
The rainbows of the Veil, or rather the spray- and
foam-bows, are superb, because the waters are dashed
among angular blocks of granite at the foot, producing
abundance of spray of the best quality for iris effects,
and also for a luxuriant growth of grass and maiden-hair
on the side of the talus, which lower down is planted
with oak, laurel and willows.
On the other side of the Valley, almost immediately
opposite the Bridal Veil, there is another fine fall,
considerably wider than the Veil when the snow is
melting fast and more than 1000 feet in height, measured
from the brow of the cliff where it first springs out
into the air to the head of the rocky talus on which
it strikes and is broken up into ragged cascades.
It is called the Ribbon Fall or Virgin’s Tears.
During the spring floods it is a magnificent object,
but the suffocating blasts of spray that fill the
recess in the wall which it occupies prevent a near
approach. In autumn, however when its feeble current
falls in a shower, it may then pass for tear with
the sentimental onlooker fresh from a visit to the
Bridal Veil.
Just beyond this glorious flood the El Capitan Rock,
regarded by many as the most sublime feature of the
Valley, is seen through the pine groves, standing
forward beyond the general line of the wall in most
imposing grandeur, a type of permanence. It is
3300 feet high, a plain, severely simple, glacier-sculptured
face of granite, the end of one of the most compact
and enduring of the mountain ridges, unrivaled in height
and breadth and flawless strength.
