With your heart aglow, spangling Lake Tenaya and Lake
May will beckon you away for walks on their ice-burnished
shores. Leave Tenaya at the west end, cross to
the south side of the outlet, find gradually work
your way up in an almost straight south direction to
the summit of the divide between Tenaya Creek and
the main upper Merced River or Nevada Creek and follow
the divide to Clouds Rest. After a glorious view
from the crest of this lofty granite wave you will
find a trail on its western end that will lead you
down past Nevada and Vernal Falls to the Valley in
good time, provided you left your Hoffman sky camp
early.
No. 2.
Another grand two-day excursion is the same as the
first of the one-day trips, as far as the head of
Illilouette Fall. From there trace the beautiful
stream up through the heart of its magnificent forests
and gardens to the canyons between the Red and Merced
Peaks, and pass the night where I camped forty-one
years ago. Early next morning visit the small
glacier on the north side of Merced Peak, the first
of the sixty-five that I discovered in the Sierra.
Glacial phenomena in the Illilouette Basin are on
the grandest scale, and in the course of my explorations
I found that the canyon and moraines between the Merced
and Red Mountains were the most interesting of them
all. The path of the vanished glacier shone in
many places as if washed with silver, and pushing
up the canyon on this bright road I passed lake after
lake in solid basins of granite and many a meadow
along the canyon stream that links them together.
The main lateral moraines that bound the view below
the canyon are from a hundred to nearly two hundred
feet high and wonderfully regular, like artificial
embankments covered with a magnificent growth of silver
fir and pine. But this garden and forest luxuriance
is speedily left behind, and patches of bryanthus,
cassiope and arctic willows begin to appear. The
small lakes which a few miles down the Valley are so
richly bordered with flowery meadows have at an elevation
of 10,000 feet only small brown mats of carex, leaving
bare rocks around more than half their shores.
Yet, strange to say, amid all this arctic repression
the mountain pine on ledges and buttresses of Red
Mountain seems to find the climate best suited to
it. Some specimens that I measured were over a
hundred feet high and twenty-four feet in circumference,
showing hardly a trace of severe storms, looking as
fresh and vigorous as the giants of the lower zones.
Evening came on just as I got fairly into the main
canyon. It is about a mile wide and a little less
than two miles long. The crumbling spurs of Red
Mountain bound it on the north, the somber cliffs
of Merced Mountain on the south and a deeply-serrated,
splintered ridge curving around from mountain to mountain
shuts it in on the east. My camp was on the brink
of one of the lakes in a thicket of mountain hemlock,
