ttempt to
seek their way back to Yosemite alone through the drifts.

My general plan was simply this: to scale the canon, wall, cross over to
the eastern flank of the range, and then make my way southward to the
northern spurs of Mount Ritter in compliance with the intervening
topography; for to push on directly southward from camp through the
innumerable peaks and pinnacles that adorn this portion of the axis of
the range, however interesting, would take too much time, besides being
extremely difficult and dangerous at this time of year.

All my first day was pure pleasure; simply mountaineering indulgence,
crossing the dry pathways of the ancient glaciers, tracing happy
streams, and learning the habits of the birds and marmots in the groves
and rocks. Before I had gone a mile from camp, I came to the foot of a
white cascade that beats its way down a rugged gorge in the canon wall,
from a height of about nine hundred feet, and pours its throbbing waters
into the Tuolumne. I was acquainted with its fountains, which,
fortunately, lay in my course. What a fine traveling companion it proved
to be, what songs it sang, and how passionately it told the mountain's
own joy! Gladly I climbed along its dashing border, absorbing its divine
music, and bathing from time to time in waftings of irised spray.
Climbing higher, higher, now beauty came streaming on the sight: painted
meadows, late-blooming gardens, peaks of rare architecture, lakes here
and there, shining like silver, and glimpses of the forested middle
region and the yellow lowlands far in the west. Beyond the range I saw
the so-called Mono Desert, lying dreamily silent in thick purple
light--a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished
granite. Here the waters divide, shouting in glorious enthusiasm, and
falling eastward to vanish in the volcanic sands and dry sky of the
Great Basin, or westward to the Great Valley of California, and thence
through the Bay of San Francisco and the Golden Gate to the sea.

Passing a little way down over the summit until I had reached an
elevation of about 10,000 feet, I pushed on southward toward a group of
savage peaks that stand guard about Ritter on the north and west,
groping my way, and dealing instinctively with every obstacle as it
presented itself. Here a huge gorge would be found cutting across my
path, along the dizzy edge of which I scrambled until some less
precipitous point was discovered where I might