File:Our national parks (1909) (14596229768).jpg

Identifier: ournationalparks1909muir (find matches)
Title: Our national parks
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Muir, John, 1838-1914 author
Subjects: National parks and reserves
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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cious of the milesyou have walked. And so on to the summit.For all the way up the long red slate slopes, thatin the distance seemed barren, you find little gar-den beds and tufts of dwarf phlox, ivesia, andblue arctic daisies that go straight to your heart,blessed fellow mountaineers kept safe and warmby a thousand miracles. You are now more thanthirteen thousand feet above the sea, and to thenorth and south you behold a sublime wildernessof mountains in glorious array, their snowy sum-mits towering together in crowded, bewilderingabundance, shoulder to shoulder, peak beyondpeak. To the east lies the Great Basin, barren-looking and silent, apparently a land of puredesolation, rich only in beautiful light. MonoLake, fourteen miles long, is outspread belowyou at a depth of nearly seven thousand feet, itsshores of volcanic ashes and sand, treeless andsunburned; a group of volcanic cones, withwell-formed, unwasted craters rises to the southof the lake ; while up from its eastern shore in-
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w>« H O Pi H He THE YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK 95 numerable mountains with soft flowing outlinesextend range beyond range, gray, and pale purple,and blue, — the farthest gradually fading on theglowing horizon. Westward you look down andover the countless moraines, glacier meadows,and grand sea of domes and rock waves of theupper Tuolumne basin, the Cathedral and Hoff-man mountains with their wavering lines andzones of forest, the wonderful region to the northof the Tuolumne Canon, and across the dark beltof silver firs to the pale mountains of the coast. In the icy fountains of the Mount Lyell andBitter groups of peaks, to the south of Dana,three of the most important of the Sierra rivers— the Tuolumne, Merced, and San Joaquin —take their rise, their highest tributaries beingwithin a few miles of one another as they rushforth on their adventurous courses from beneathsnow banks and glaciers. Of the small shrinking glaciers of the Sierra,remnants of the majestic system that sculpt

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