n after one brief
journey through it; impossible to set down in order the details of
that day's travel and the next, confused as they were by the
consciousness of tired muscles and eyes bewildered by the all too
hurried succession of interests. Little more than impressions
remain--memories of cliffs rising from three to five thousand feet
above us; of a walk of half a mile on stepping stones along the
river; of more talus-piles; of the entrance into the rattlesnake
zone; of a walk through a still forest of tall firs and young
cedars, where our voices seemed to break the silence of ages; of
more talus-piles; of a camp beneath the firs among deep fern-beds,
and of the red ants that there congregated; of more brush and more
talus-piles; of a look down Muir Gorge and a hot climb up a
thousand feet over the rocks to the cairn of stones containing the
precious register; of a cliff extending to the river's edge which
presented the alternative of edging across it on a crack or
climbing a five-hundred-foot hill to get around it.

The Tuolumne is one of the largest of our Sierra rivers, much
greater in volume than its quieter neighbor, the Merced. Its falls,
often of an imposing height, are none of them sheer, none of them
giving that impression of pure joy of living with which the Merced
waters leap into the great Nevada abyss. For the Tuolumne's is a
sterner, stormier course, beset with giant rocks against which
even its splendid strength is impotently hurled, and its joy is the
joy of battles. But it is a strange thing, standing beside one of
these giant cataracts where the ground shakes with the impact and
where every voice of wind or living creature is silenced in the
roar of the maddened waters, to see under what a delicate fabric
this Titan's force is veiled--a billowing, gossamer texture,
iris-tinted, with jeweled spray flying high upon the wind.

Then came Hetch-Hetchy, after two days of strenuous pursuit of the
Tuolumne's galloping waters.

When we were there Hetch-Hetchy was a valley untrammeled, carpeted with
grass and flowers, walled by mighty cliffs, traversed by the unfettered
Tuolumne. Of late, as all the outdoor world knows, its freedom has been
bartered and its fate sealed--the fate of being drowned beneath a
reservoir whose waters are to quench the thirst of San Fran