Here is a spring on the left, hidden in a grove of alders and willows, and now new and more fantastic spires arise on the right.  Higher up we see where those sturdy road-builders rolled giant rocks out of their way to make an impassable road look as if it could be traversed.

Reaching the point at the foot of Squaw Peak at last we look back over Squaw Valley.  In the late summer tints it is beautiful, but what must it be in the full flush of its summer glory and perfection?  Then it must be a delight to the eye and a refreshment to the soul.  How interesting, too, it is to rehabilitate it as a great glacial lake.  One can see its pellucid waters of clear amethystine blue and imagine the scenes that transpired when the ancestors of the present Indians fished, in rude dugouts, or on logs, or extemporized rafts, upon its surface.  Now it is covered with brown, yellowish grass, with tree-clad slopes rising from the marge.

Turning to the right we find ourselves in a country of massive bowlders.  They seem to have been broken off from the summits above and arrested here for future ages and movements to change or pass on.

The road grows severer than ever, and we cannot help again picturing those old heroes driving their wagons up, while the women and children toiled painfully on foot up the steep and rocky slopes.  Could anything ever daunt them after this? any obstacle, however insurmountable, discourage them? any labor, however severe, compel them to turn back?

Though there is a deep pathos in all these memories, the heroism of it makes our blood tingle with pride that such men and women belonged to us, that we are privileged to live in the land their labors, loves and lives have sanctified.

We turn to the right; a tiny waterfall, which in the season must be quite a sight, trickles down near by; we are now advancing directly upon the serrated ridge of fantastic spires that have long accompanied us.  We now find those white-seeming pinnacles are of delicate pinks, creams, blues, slates and grays.  In one place, however, it seems for all the world as if there were a miniature Gothic chapel built of dark, brownish-black lava.  Another small patch of the same color and material, lower down, presents a gable end, with windows, reminding us of the popular picture of Melrose Abbey in the moonlight.

Now we are lined on either side by removed bowlders, but the road! ah the road! who could ever have traveled over it?  Trees twenty feet high have now grown up in the roadway.  To the left Squaw Peak (8960 feet) towers above us, while we make the last great pull through the rocky portion ere we come to the easier rise to the shoulders of Granite Chief.  Here the road was graded out from the side of a granite mountain, blasted out and built up, but it is now sadly washed out.  Further up, a broad porphyritic dyke crosses our path, then more trees, and we come to the gentle slope of a kind of granitic sand which