r. It is impossible to enter it without exaltation of spirit, or
describe it without superlative.

A very large proportion of Yosemite's visitors see nothing more than the
Valley, yet no consideration is tenable which conceives the Valley as
other than a small part of the national park. The two are inseparable.
One does not speak of knowing the Louvre who has seen only the Venus de
Milo, or St. Mark's who has looked only upon its horses.

Considered as a whole, the park is a sagging plain of solid granite,
hung from Sierra's saw-toothed crest, broken into divides and transverse
mountain ranges, punctured by volcanic summits, gashed and bitten by
prehistoric glaciers, dotted near its summits with glacial lakes,
furrowed by innumerable cascading streams which combine in singing
rivers, which, in turn, furrow greater canyons, some of majestic depth
and grandeur. It is a land of towering spires and ambitious summits,
serrated cirques, enormous isolated rock masses, rounded granite domes,
polished granite pavements, lofty precipices, and long, shimmering
waterfalls.

Bare and gale-ridden near its crest, the park descends in thirty miles
through all the zones and gradations of animal and vegetable life
through which one would pass in travelling from the ice-bound shores of
the Arctic Ocean the continent's length to Mariposa Grove. Its tree
sequence tells the story. Above timber-line there are none but inch-high
willows and flat, piney growths, mingled with tiny arctic flowers, which
shrink in size with elevation; even the sheltered spots on Lyell's lofty
summit have their colored lichens, and their almost microscopic bloom.
At timber-line, low, wiry shrubs interweave their branches to defy the
gales, merging lower down into a tangle of many stunted growths, from
which spring twisted pines and contorted spruces, which the winds curve
to leeward or bend at sharp angles, or spread in full development as
prostrate upon the ground as the mountain lion's skin upon the home
floor of his slayer.

Descending into the great area of the Canadian zone, with its thousand
wild valleys, its shining lakes, its roaring creeks and plunging rivers,
the zone of the angler, the hiker, and the camper-out, we enter forests
of various pines, of silver fir, hemlock, aged hump-backed juniper, and
the species of white pine which Californians wrongly call tamarack.

This is the paradise of outdoor living; it almost never rains between
June and Octo