per Tuolumne cascades. This stream
I traced down through its many dells and gorges, meadows and bogs,
reaching the brink of the main Tuolumne at dusk.

A loud whoop for the artists was answered again and again. Their
camp-fire came in sight, and half an hour afterward I was with them.
They seemed unreasonably glad to see me. I had been absent only three
days; nevertheless, though the weather was fine, they had already been
weighing chances as to whether I would ever return, and trying to decide
whether they should wait longer or begin to seek their way back to the
lowlands. Now their curious troubles were over. They packed their
precious sketches, and next morning we set out homeward bound, and in
two days entered the Yosemite Valley from the north by way of Indian
Canon.

CHAPTER V

THE PASSES

The sustained grandeur of the High Sierra is strikingly illustrated by
the great height of the passes. Between latitude 36 deg. 20' and 38 deg. the
lowest pass, gap, gorge, or notch of any kind cutting across the axis of
the range, as far as I have discovered, exceeds 9000 feet in height
above the level of the sea; while the average height of all that are in
use, either by Indians or whites, is perhaps not less than 11,000 feet,
and not one of these is a carriage-pass.

Farther north a carriage-road has been constructed through what is known
as the Sonora Pass, on the head waters of the Stanislaus and Walker's
rivers, the summit of which is about 10,000 feet above the sea.
Substantial wagon-roads have also been built through the Carson and
Johnson passes, near the head of Lake Tahoe, over which immense
quantities of freight were hauled from California to the mining regions
of Nevada, before the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad.

Still farther north, a considerable number of comparatively low passes
occur, some of which are accessible to wheeled vehicles, and through
these rugged defiles during the exciting years of the gold period long
emigrant-trains with foot-sore cattle wearily toiled. After the
toil-worn adventurers had escaped a thousand dangers and had crawled
thousands of miles across the plains the snowy Sierra at last loomed in
sight, the eastern wall of the land of gold. And as with shaded eyes
they gazed through the tremulous haze of the desert, with what joy must
they have descried the pass through which they were to enter the better
land of their hopes and dreams!

Between the Sonora Pas