Surely never altogether unhappy to one who has before him the Yosemite, or, better still, carries its remembrance—a memory that can never die.
 From San Francisco by boat to Stockton, from Stockton to Knight's Ferry, from Knight's Ferry to Chinese Camp, from Chinese Camp to Garrote (sugges-tive name in the mining regions), reaching supper and beds at ten of the evening after seventy-one miles of staging.
 As to the dust absorbed during those seventy-one miles—justice cannot be done to it. It was California dust.  What more can be said? Not sand, not grit, nor any thing a traveler before knew by that name; but powder, in which the horses' feet fall noiselessly, and which fills hair, eyes, nose ears, throat, lungs, and skin, not only sifting through, but dyeing every garment worn.
 At first I strove to be godly—I mean akin to godly—cleanly; and so signally failed in the last as to overthrow all hope of the first. I worried, and shook, and brushed, and cleaned, and scoured till skin and temper were equally rasped and life a burthen, and finally decided to be consti-tutionally dirty and comfortable.
 We were monuments of dust that night, and tired enough to sleep, even at Garrote, but quite ready for an early start the next morning, and impatient to reach Harden's Mills, twenty miles away, where we took horse for the Valley.
 No baggage save hand-bags. Three of the party encased against wind and weather, unfashionable and picturesque; the fourth member of the organization arrayed in a soft felt hat, blue costume consisting of loose coat, skirt to the knee, Turkish trowsers, woollen stockings, and stout shoes. So armed and equipped we bestrode our beasts, and were away to the Yosemite, not, however, till we were joined by another party bound to the same destination, one of the ladies surveying our lady with disdain, and audibly desiring her companions to "look at that vulgar creature".
 And the vulgar creature, from her safe and comfortable and natural seat, surveyed the wretched "ladies' horses", sore of back, lame of leg, beheld the girthing and tightening and fussing over the groaning and miserable creat-ures, the lift into the saddles, the ungainly bags of figures composed of half-long skirts and clumsy "waterproofs", the twisted bodies and uncomfortable attitudes—took a mental look ahead at the twelve hours' ride over rough and dangerous roads, smiled to herself, and thought, "look at those idiots".
 Sensible and foolish, we started and rode hour after hour through solemn aisles of majestic trees till, toward the close of the afternoon, we reached open ground, where broke upon us the overture to the great harmony toward which we tended—a sight to take one's breath, yet merely the vestibule of the King's Temple beyond.
 "Here," said the guide, "we begin the descent to the valley."
 And we descended.
 Mesdames, the critics, indulged in a good deal of screaming, slipped at divers points, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, from their horses, walked over the roughest places, summoned guides and masculine friends to lead their animals, to render help of voice and hand, embraced neck and mane of their four-legged servants, till the poor beasties having this misery added to their torturing girths must have almost smothered, and held on to saddle and pommel till hands, arms, and chests were strained to numbness.
 And no wonder!
 Said Cushing, my tall, long-limbed, bright-haired, wide-awake guide, who had bestrode every thing from a circus horse to a bucking Indian pony—said Cushing, after jerking over and tightening down for the twentieth time one of the one-sided leather abominations, "There ain't dust enough" (gold dust, innocent Eastern friends!) "lying around loose to hire me to ride on one of those things."
 "Afraid of your neck?" said I.
 "You bet," said he.
 Through countless tribulations even the social martyrs reached the end of the seven-miles' plunge, and rode forward, with the Ishmaels of the party, into the Great Valley, the world's wonder, a sight for men and angels to gaze at with awe!
 Before us, at the left as we entered, shutting in the view, stood "El Capitan," a perpendicular wall, no growth marring it, no jagged points thrust out from it, no waste nor debris at its base, rising clean and grand thirty-one hundred feet from a line already four thousand feet above the sea.  Broad and strong at foot and summit, it gives, more than any other rock in the valley, a sense of solidity, power, massiveness.
 Round the base of this we rode, rock after rock coming into sight, taking strange and airy and wonderful and sub-lime shapes, changing and changing again as we moved along and beheld them from different points of vision.
 Through the valley we advanced for the first time through the solemn stillness of the night, the moonlight half revealing, half concealing the awful mountain majesties circling round and resting with  chastened splendor upon a fall of water so white, so airy, so delicate as to seem the ghost of a torrent, dropping its length twenty-six hundred feet!
 Tired as I was, aching from head to toe, I forgot I had a body as I gazed.  Still, to confess to human weakness, I shed no tears when, at nine o'clock, we found at Hutching's ranche a comfortable supper, and beds that would certainly lull no sybarite to slumber, but were better than double action spring mattresses to our weary brains and limbs.
 I know of no more hopeless task than the effort to convey to another any apprehension of this marvel of nature's handiwork. The popular idea is that of a sort of magnificent gulch—two great walls of rock broken at their summits.
 The reality is a valley eight miles in length, and from half a mile to a mile in width, a mountain stream rushing, white-crested, through its centre, great pines adorning it, and the freshest of grass covering the ground.
 From this quiet greenness, level as a city avenue, with no gradual slope, these marvelous shapes abruptly rise in air, white, shining, clean of verdure, perfect in outlines, three, four, five thousand feet high; rocks like cathedral domes and castle towers, rocks pointed so sharply as to seem like needles, and rocks tapering off more softly and slowly to their heads.
 These fine and grand, these penetratingly beautiful shapes, have been painted and copied and photographed till multitudes are familiar with their outline, but neither picture nor description can convey any hint of the height and depth, the greatness, the majesty of it all, and description added to picture, and picture studied, and then the eye used on the living presentment, all fail to enable you to grasp the marvelous whole.
 You gaze and count, wonder and calculate, make your neck ache and your understanding crack, and you say "this is two thousand," or "this is five thousand feet high," or "this fall plunges down a thousand—twenty-six hundred feet," and you iterate and repeat till the words and figures bear no sense to your mind, and are but empty sounds.
 There is nothing whereby to compare.  The trees in the valley elsewhere would be marvels.  There, standing at the base of one of these stupendous piles, they seem but common scanty growth, and this pile, among its neighbors, is simply a rock in the midst of rocks, and if you try to compel an understanding of the thing before you, you stretch and struggle till the brain feels bursting, and at last confess your impotency.  You cannot grasp and take it in.
 When we see from above, when the trammels and bounds of earthy calculation and human ability are thrown aside, we may comprehend Yosemite, but not now.  It is the spiritual eyes alone that can behold with the possessing vision this god-like scene.
 But, to a mere human, what days of delight does it afford and what memories to hold in trust!  I bethink me of one evening when we tramped past the lovely heads of the Three Graces, the stately strength of the Sentinel, and the solemn majesty of the Cathedral Pile to behold the sun-setting on one of the strangest "Bridal Veils" in the world.
 Assuredly the spirit for which it was made must be "tall," and ought to be "young and fair," since itself is in length nine hundred and fifty feet.
 Narrow at its top, and fanning out as it falls into lace-like mist and filmy gossamer spray. Here and there through its spider web the water gathers into arrow-heads drawing after them long spreading tails, and looking, as they shoot downward, like marvels from frost or fairy land.
 It had rained through the afternoon, and as we stood at the foot of the fall, there were in full view four distinct bows spanning the valley from the North to the Half Dome, with sections of other bows flung about in lavish splendor.  The fall itself was a dazzling mass of prismatic hues, the sky and air filled with rosy and amber light, till at last the glorious colors crept slowly up their shining ladder and left the fall to a gray pallor that was wraith-like and sad.
 And of one morning when we rode over to Mirror Lake, lying outside the valley, on the placid surface of which the mountains around reappear with marvelous fidelity, not only in shape and coloring, but seemingly in the very texture of the rocks, till, as you gaze downward, you clap hand on head, and prospect for signs of feet, to decide the relative positions of each, and so make sure which is mountain and which shadow.
 And of other and yet other days upon which we clambered up the white granite face of this or that giant, to look out at his comrades, and did not go astray, because we could not, in finding sights that would have repaid the expenditure of any amount of time and toil.
 And of one supreme day when we mounted steed, rode away under the stately forest growth through the pass by the Half Dome, close to the side of the sparkling and plunging Merced River, till the trail grew so steep and narrow our animals could no further go, then, dismounting, took to our own feet and the companionship of stout walking-sticks up a most forbidding pathway that led us to the Vernal Fall.
 A leap of three hundred and fifty feet, white as falling snow, glittering as gems, laughing and dancing down its wall of glacier-like rock, not grand, nor solemnizing, nor overwhelming, but just perfection—that is the Vernal Fall.
 We dived into waterproof cases and clambered on.  The mud ankle deep, the blinding spray beating against us like a heavy fall of rain, so past its base, then, dropping the unwieldy over-garments, scrambled by its side, up, up a ladder placed against the flat cheek of granite, then up, up, up another ladder, and so were at the top.
 A broad smooth table of stone, at its outer edge a natural parapet, breast high, and shaped as though made with hands, over which one can lean and look for hours—not content with this I crawled to the point where the water plunged over the lip of the fall, thrust out my head, and tried to gaze my fill at the dazzling mass as it swept down and away.  Below it the shining line of the river.  The rocks of the valley in the near distance.  Afar a world of mountains.  Overhead a few fleecy clouds showing against a sky that was like polished turquoise.
 After a space—oh, woeful falling off—we traveled onward to a charming spot, midway the head of the Vernal and the foot of the Nevada Falls, camped, ate our lunch—low be it spoken—with the appetite of wolves, then, rested and refurbished, went our way to the Cap of Liberty.
 The mountain is exactly defined by its name. It is as perfect a Liberty Cap as though it were the great original, and the most beautiful object to be seen even here.
 Standing solitary from its base, not a rock touching it nor even resting near, its face and sides white as purity, bare as penury and upright as truth, its back a slope dotted with timber that makes it possible of ascent, forty-eight hundred feet above the valley, and the valley four thousand feed above the sea.
 None but Indians and a venturesome guide had hitherto ascended it, and at starting we were cheered by dismal forebodings and prognostications of defeat.
 Well, we went up it.  What else should we do?  A hard climb, a hot climb, a steep climb; there were spaces where we had to take off our shoes and travel in stocking feet—gingerly at that, and there were places where my tall guide, having first "skinned up" perpendicular walls of rock, then flattened and bent down, did his best to dislocate two pairs of arms as he "yanked" me bodily to standing ground behind him, and there were shining shelving reaches, glittering and slippery as ice that we crawled over on hands and knees, and there were stretches of journey where we were parched for want of water, and there were rattlesnakes in abundance, two of which I killed with stick and claw, and was vastly inflated by the achievement, and finally there was the summit!
 A fragmentary view of the valley on the one side; on the other the "Little Yosemite," at this distance almost rivaling in beauty its great name sake; two far off mountains, "Cloud's Rest" and the "Cathedral Peak," dwarfing by their majesty those near at hand; ranges and spurs of the Sierras with glittering heads, looming up across emerald spaces, here and there a point so blue as to show black, so steep and high as to be blown bare of snow, and close beside and above us, across the pallid brow of the "Half Dome," a thunderstorm swirling and raging, deafening reverberations sounding from peak to peak, lightning ripping the air with the sound of tearing cambric, electricity clawing at the gazer with small fiend-like talons, and at last calm and an effulgent light as the sun, dispersing all blots and blemishes, moved slowly and majestically to the west.
 So absorbed were we as to lose thought of time.  When at last we made the descent, struck across the intervening mile to the top of the Nevada Fall, gazed at its 700 feet of splendor, dropped down its side, and finally gained the parapet of the Vernal Fall, the air was no longer dusky but dense—it was not twilight, but night.
 Certainly the ladder transit was wild enough, back foremost, hands and feet both in hard service, but that was holiday toil to the rest of the tramp!
 The way was dark.  The path was slippery, stones, and foot-deep mud making each step a danger; a wall of rock on the one hand, the wraith-like fall of hundreds of feet on the other, an abyss beneath; a thunderous roar filling the air, the spray and mist flying wild and white through the night.  Below us Egyptian darkness, all about us sombre mountains, inaccessible heights, their tops thousands of feet away, peaks and points and towers and pinnacles and domes, shapes of beauty and shapes of grace, and shapes of majesty and power: these and these alone touched by the rising glory of the moon, and fairly glittering in its light.
 All experiences have an end.  At last we gained our horses, plunged down the gloomy treacherous trail, and at midnight reached our temporary home.
 Certainly we did very little climbing the next morning, but the next evening I mounted my pony and rode away alone for a farewell sunset.
 Rain had been falling, a refreshing shower from a sunlit sky, and the air was full of a splendor of coloring that no pigment and canvas could reproduce.  On one side of the valley the rocks stood gray and drear; on the other rich crimson gave way to purple, purple to amethyst, amethyst to blue, blue to imperceptible shadings of delicate and exquisite hues, the effect being not that of tinted granite, but of a haze that left the outlines clearly defined, yet touched them with the softness of velvet.  At the west, where the mountains close in, a scrap of sky looking like nothing so much as an enormous emerald.
 I sat still on my pony till all the splendid phantasmagoria vanished, and the stone sentries stood brown, gray, black, deep shadows lining them, the gloom of night compassing them, watched by the solemn stillness of the stars; and the next morning we rode away from both daylight and starlight in the wonderful valley.
 An all-day ride along the Maripose trail, to a night's repose at "Clarke's ranche;" a morning with the Big Trees and their majestic neighbors the firs and sugar-pines, each of these large enough to be elsewhere a world's wonder, good things to see, good things to remember—one must lift eye, and thought, and imagination to them even in memory—from these, fourteen miles of "deep sea-diving," an undeviating descent that puts knee-pans at a discount for some days thereafter, a ride ending at "White & Hatch's," where we were fed like kings and slept the sleep of the just.
 A night coach-ride—the night void of moon and sights—suited not us who wanted to see every thing, so our last stage was made in a hired shebang which took us to Stockton.
 Truly a fine-looking turn-out was presented to view at four o'clock of the pleasant summer morning!
 At least clean, whole, and unencumbered when we went into the valley, we turned away therefrom and set our faces toward civilization fit subjects for its chastening hand.
 Capital horses, a spring wagon burdened with no luggage save paltry hand-bags, yet furnishing no superfluous room for its human freight—a big canvas bag of moss, another of cones, manzanita sticks, and other sticks wrapped in shreds of garments, and tied together in unshapely bundles; clumsy pieces of big-tree bark; thumping pieces of big-tree wood; cones too precious to be trusted to the bag, held by their stems with questionable rags draped preservatively about them; long poles festooned with moss thrust out behind; presiding over all, four dirty, ragged, unshorn, unkempt, entirely contented tramps with their German driver, and epitome of horse lore and good-nature—a spectacle to provoke envy and horror.
 Fortunately there were no critical eyes to gaze at us, and be shocked at the sight.  With change of animals we rode that day eighty-five miles, and met not a soul.  Every-where yellow wheat fields dotted with oaks, but the country generally so lonely, so bare and parched as to give one a sense of desolation.
 Yet surely never before was seeming desolation such real richness.  We passed one wheat-field, unbroken by fence or stake, undivided save by the beds of two rivers (needing no division, since it was the partnership property of two men), fifty-seven miles in length!
 Halted at a ferry thirty miles out of Stockton, and camped for the night under the light of the "Lone Star."
 I have traveled, and I am not squeamish, and I've stopped at Western hotels, and difficult ones at that, but I confess to being appalled at this hostel.
 A house without upper regions.  The lower regions carpetless, furnitureless, save for a few benches about a central board in the diningroom; beds as abandoned by their latest occupants, and infested by "their legal inhabitants" (if length of possession gives right) in the sleeping cells; some phenomenally dirty wash-basins without accompaniment of water, soap or towels, in solitary possession of the toilet apartment, not another thing in the place but bushels of meal-like dust lying round or heaped up "promiscuous"—a species of furniture and ornamentation combined.  At least it served to fill spaces that would else have been given over to absolute vacancy.
 A big gaunt woman, mistress and maid, cooked us an atrociously bad supper, a big gaunt man, her husband, served it, a half dozen villainous looking drovers helped us eat it, after which, having failed to beg, borrow, or steal any clean linen for the beds, I made them up wrong side out, retired to my own den and slept on the floor—and avenge myself the next night at Frisco, by ringing my bell at intervals of twenty minutes, and having the entire procession of bell boys at the Cosmopolitan "roped in" to my service.
 
 

Copyright 2000, Enos Mills Cabin, Temporal Mechanical Press
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