A Few Snowy Mountain-Tops Appear
Beyond It, And On Either Hand Rise A Series Of Majestic, Pale-Gray
Granite
Rocks from three to four thousand feet high, some of them
thinly forested and striped with bushes and flowery grass
On narrow
shelves, especially about half way up, others severely sheer and bare
and built together into walls like those of Yosemite, extending far
beyond the ice barrier, one immense brow appearing beyond another
with their bases buried in the glacier. This is a Yosemite Valley in
process of formation, the modeling and sculpture of the walls nearly
completed and well planted, but no groves as yet or gardens or
meadows on the raw and unfinished bottom. It is as if the explorer,
in entering the Merced Yosemite, should find the walls nearly in
their present condition, trees and flowers in the warm nooks and
along the sunny portions of the moraine-covered brows, but the bottom
of the valley still covered with water and beds of gravel and mud,
and the grand glacier that formed it slowly receding but still
filling the upper half of the valley.
Sailing directly up to the edge of the low, outspread, water-washed
terminal moraine, scarce noticeable in a general view, we seemed to
be separated from the glacier only by a bed of gravel a hundred yards
or so in width; but on so grand a scale are all the main features of
the valley, we afterwards found the distance to be a mile or more.
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