re mostly open to me, and expansive, at least on one side.
On the left were the purple plains of Mono, reposing dreamily and warm;
on the right, the near peaks springing keenly into the thin sky with
more and more impressive sublimity. But these larger views were at
length lost. Rugged spurs, and moraines, and huge, projecting buttresses
began to shut me in. Every feature became more rigidly alpine, without,
however, producing any chilling effect; for going to the mountains is
like going home. We always find that the strangest objects in these
fountain wilds are in some degree familiar, and we look upon them with a
vague sense of having seen them before.

On the southern shore of a frozen lake, I encountered an extensive field
of hard, granular snow, up which I scampered in fine tone, intending to
follow it to its head, and cross the rocky spur against which it leans,
hoping thus to come direct upon the base of the main Ritter peak. The
surface was pitted with oval hollows, made by stones and drifted
pine-needles that had melted themselves into the mass by the radiation
of absorbed sun-heat. These afforded good footholds, but the surface
curved more and more steeply at the head, and the pits became shallower
and less abundant, until I found myself in danger of being shed off like
avalanching snow. I persisted, however, creeping on all fours, and
shuffling up the smoothest places on my back, as I had often done on
burnished granite, until, after slipping several times, I was compelled
to retrace my course to the bottom, and make my way around the west end
of the lake, and thence up to the summit of the divide between the head
waters of Rush Creek and the northernmost tributaries of the San
Joaquin.

Arriving on the summit of this dividing crest, one of the most exciting
pieces of pure wilderness was disclosed that I ever discovered in all my
mountaineering. There, immediately in front, loomed the majestic mass of
Mount Ritter, with a glacier swooping down its face nearly to my feet,
then curving westward and pouring its frozen flood into a dark blue
lake, whose shores were bound with precipices of crystalline snow; while
a deep chasm drawn between the divide and the glacier separated the
massive picture from everything else. I could see only the one sublime
mountain, the one glacier, the one lake; the whole veiled with one blue
shadow--rock, ice, and water close together without a single leaf or
sign of life. After gazi