its granite peaks and domes pushing
ever higher above the scattering forests of its middle zones, its
eastern ramparts dropping in precipices to the desert, it valiantly
guards its sunny state against the passage of eastern highways, and
forces hard engineering problems upon the builders of transcontinental
railroads. Where it becomes the eastern boundary of the Yosemite
National Park it breaks into climaxes of magnificence.

From this point on the Sierra broadens and bulks. It throws out spurs,
multiplies paralleling ranges, heaps peaks and ridges between gulf-like
canyons which carry roaring waters through their forested trenches.
Pushing ever higher above timber-line, it breaks into large lake-bearing
cirques, sometimes cirque within cirque, walled in silvery granite, hung
with garlands of snow and dripping with shining glaciers. Ninety miles
south of Yosemite it culminates in a close grouping of snow-daubed,
glacier-gouged, lightning-splintered peaks, one of which, Mount Whitney,
highest summit in the United States, raises his head just a little above
his gigantic neighbors.

South of Whitney, the Sierra subsides rapidly and merges into the high
plateaus and minor ranges of southern California.

Seventy-five miles of the crest of this titanic range at the climax of
its magnificence, sixty-five miles of it north of Whitney and ten miles
of it south, constitute the western boundary of an area of sixteen
hundred square miles which Congress is considering setting apart under
the title of the Roosevelt National Park; a region so particularly
characterized by ruggedness, power, and unified purpose that it is
eminently fitted to serve as the nation's memorial to Theodore
Roosevelt. Besides its stupendous mountains, it includes the wildest and
most exuberant forested canyons, and the most luxuriant groves in the
United States, for its boundaries will enclose also the present Sequoia
National Park, in which a million trunks of the famous Sequoia
Washingtoniana cluster around the General Sherman Tree, believed to be
the biggest and oldest living thing in all the world.

Wide though its range from bleak crest to warm forest, every part of
this region is a necessary part of its whole. Nature's subtle finger has
so knitted each succeeding zone into the fabric of its neighbors that it
would be a vandal's hand which should arbitrarily cut the picture short
of the full completion of its perfect composition. It is one of Nature's