The Yosemite | Page 3

creatures birds, bees, butterflies--give glad animation and help to make
all the air into music. Down through the middle of the Valley flows the
crystal Merced, River of Mercy, peacefully quiet, reflecting lilies and
trees and the onlooking rocks; things frail and fleeting and types of
endurance meeting here and blending in countless forms, as if into this
one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures, to
draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her.
The Approach To The Valley
Sauntering up the foothills to Yosemite by any of the old trails or roads
in use before the railway was built from the town of Merced up the
river to the boundary of Yosemite Park, richer and wilder become the
forests and streams. At an elevation of 6000 feet above the level of the
sea the silver firs are 200 feet high, with branches whorled around the
colossal shafts in regular order, and every branch beautifully pinnate
like a fern frond. The Douglas spruce, the yellow and sugar pines and
brown-barked Libocedrus here reach their finest developments of
beauty and grandeur. The majestic Sequoia is here, too, the king of
conifers, the noblest of all the noble race. These colossal trees are as
wonderful in fineness of beauty and proportion as in stature--an
assemblage of conifers surpassing all that have ever yet been
discovered in the forests of the world. Here indeed is the tree-lover's

paradise; the woods, dry and wholesome, letting in the light in
shimmering masses of half sunshine, half shade; the night air as well as
the day air indescribably spicy and exhilarating; plushy fir-boughs for
campers' beds and cascades to sing us to sleep. On the highest ridges,
over which these old Yosemite ways passed, the silver fir (Abies
magnifica) forms the bulk of the woods, pressing forward in glorious
array to the very brink of the Valley walls on both sides, and beyond
the Valley to a height of from 8000 to 9000 feet above the level of the
sea. Thus it appears that Yosemite, presenting such stupendous faces of
bare granite, is nevertheless imbedded in magnificent forests, and the
main species of pine, fir, spruce and libocedrus are also found in the
Valley itself, but there are no "big trees" (Sequoia gigantea) in the
Valley or about the rim of it. The nearest are about ten and twenty
miles beyond the lower end of the valley on small tributaries of the
Merced and Tuolumne Rivers.
The First View: The Bridal Veil
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.
General Features Of The Valley
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