GLACIER POINT, YOSEMITE VALLEY, CALIFORNIA - If possible, all visitors to the Yosemite should make an excursion around it on the outside of the valley itself. Such a tour can now be safely accomplished on horseback over beaten trails, and the circuit of the Yosemite can thus be made in a few days, the memory of which will be well worth a year of ordinary existence. Even those who can not make the entire excursion should at least ride out on the "McCauley trail" a few miles, as far as "Glacier Point," which is a stupendous, perpendicular mountain of solid rock more than 3,000 feet in height. The bottom of the valley, which is one vast flower-garden, looks like a long and narrow Persian rug of varied hues, on which occasional structures, even when viewed through a field-glass, seem like dice upon a checker-board, while trees of several centuries' growth appear at that distance no larger than tacks. Directly opposite, along the front of a gigantic mountain a mile and a half away, the glorions Yosemite Fall comes plunging downward for 2,600 feet in three prodigious leaps, of which the first alone clears 1,500 feet! No falls in the world, not even in Norway, equal this in height and grandeur, and the solemn and eternal roar of its descending waters seems to the lonely tourist on Glacier Point like some unearthly, awe-inspiring symphony, descriptive of the Worship of Humanity on one of the grandest altars of God's Universe. |
