The Walls Rise In Yosemite Forms, And Tenaya Creek Comes
Down Seven Hundred Feet In A White Brush Of Foam.
This is a little
Yosemite valley.
It is about two thousand feet above the level of the
main Yosemite, and about twenty-four hundred below Lake Tenaya.
I found the lake frozen, and the ice was so clear and unruffled that
the surrounding mountains and the groves that look down upon it were
reflected almost as perfectly as I ever beheld them in the calm
evening mirrors of summer. At a little distance, it was difficult to
believe the lake frozen at all; and when I walked out on it,
cautiously stamping at short intervals to test the strength of the
ice, I seemed to walk mysteriously, without adequate faith, on the
surface of the water. The ice was so transparent that I could see
through it the beautifully wave-rippled, sandy bottom, and the scales
of mica glinting back the down-pouring light. When I knelt down with
my face close to the ice, through which the sunbeams were pouring, I
was delighted to discover myriads of Tyndall's six-rayed water
flowers, magnificently colored.
A grand old mountain mansion is this Tenaya region! In the glacier
period it was a mer de glace, far grander than the mer de glace of
Switzerland, which is only about half a mile broad. The Tenaya mer de
glace was not less than two miles broad, late in the glacier epoch,
when all the principal dividing crests were bare; and its depth was
not less than fifteen hundred feet.
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