twilight.
How raw and young this region appears! Had the ice sheet that swept
over it vanished but yesterday, its traces on the more resisting
portions about our camp could hardly be more distinct than they now are.
The horses and sheep and all of us, indeed, slipped on the smoothest
places.

_July 14._ How deathlike is sleep in this mountain air, and quick the
awakening into newness of life! A calm dawn, yellow and purple, then
floods of sun-gold, making every thing tingle and glow.

In an hour or two we came to Yosemite Creek, the stream that makes the
greatest of all the Yosemite falls. It is about forty feet wide at the
Mono Trail crossing, and now about four feet in average depth, flowing
about three miles an hour. The distance to the verge of the Yosemite
wall, where it makes its tremendous plunge, is only about two miles from
here. Calm, beautiful, and nearly silent, it glides with stately
gestures, a dense growth of the slender two-leaved pine along its banks,
and a fringe of willow, purple spirea, sedges, daisies, lilies, and
columbines. Some of the sedges and willow boughs dip into the current,
and just outside of the close ranks of trees there is a sunny flat of
washed gravelly sand which seems to have been deposited by some ancient
flood. It is covered with millions of erethrea, eriogonum, and
oxytheca, with more flowers than leaves, forming an even growth,
slightly dimpled and ruffled here and there by rosettes of _Spraguea
umbellata_. Back of this flowery strip there is a wavy upsloping plain
of solid granite, so smoothly ice-polished in many places that it
glistens in the sun like glass. In shallow hollows there are patches of
trees, mostly the rough form of the two-leaved pine, rather scrawny
looking where there is little or no soil. Also a few junipers
(_Juniperus occidentalis_), short and stout, with bright
cinnamon-colored bark and gray foliage, standing alone mostly, on the
sun-beaten pavement, safe from fire, clinging by slight joints,--a
sturdy storm-enduring mountaineer of a tree, living on sunshine and
snow, maintaining tough health on this diet for perhaps more than a
thousand years.

Up towards the head of the basin I see groups of domes rising above the
wavelike ridges, and some picturesque castellated masses, and dark
strips and patches of silver fir, indicating deposits of fertile soil.
Would that I could command the time to study them! What rich excursions
one could make in this well-de