masterpieces, through whose extremest contrasts runs the common note of
supremacy.

Whether or not, then, Congress insures its perpetuity and unified
development, we can consider it scenically only as a whole.

Similar in kind to the Yosemite National Park, Roosevelt is far ruggeder
and more masterful. It will be the national park of superlatives. Yet
each of these similar areas is a completed unit of striking
individuality. Yosemite, taking its note from its incomparable Valley,
never will be equalled for sheer beauty; Roosevelt knows no peer for
exuberance and grandeur. Yosemite will remain Mecca for the tourist;
Roosevelt will draw into its forest of giant trees, and upon its
shoulders of chiselled granite, thousands of campers-out and lovers of
the high trail.

Joined near the crest of the Sierra by the John Muir Trail,
California's memorial to her own prophet of the out-of-doors, these two
national parks, so alike and yet so different, each striking surely its
own note of sublimity, are, in a very real sense, parts of one still
greater whole; the marriage of beauty and strength.

II

The region is roughly pear-shaped. A straight line drawn from Pine Creek
Pass at its northern end to Sheep Mountain on the southern base line
measures sixty-eight miles; the park is thirty-six miles wide at its
widest, just north of Mount Whitney. Its eastern boundary, the crest of
the Sierra, divides many notable peaks. From north to south we pass, as
we travel the John Muir Trail, Mount Humphreys, 13,972 feet; Mount
Darwin, 13,841 feet; Mount Winchell, 13,749 feet; Split Mountain, 14,051
feet; Striped Mountain, 13,160 feet; Mount Baxter, 13,118 feet; Junction
Peak, 13,903 feet; Mount Tyndall, 14,025 feet; and Mount Whitney, 14,501
feet; supporting Whitney on the south is Mount Langley, 14,042 feet; all
these connected by splintered peaks, granite ledges, and mountain masses
scarcely less in altitude.

Between the bristling crest of this snow-daubed eastern boundary and the
park's western boundary, thousands of feet lower where the forests
begin, the region roughly divides into parallel zones. That which
immediately adjoins the crest upon its west side, a strip ten miles or
more in width, is known to its devotees as the High Sierra. It is a
country of tremendous jagged peaks, of intermediate pinnacled walls, of
enormous cirques holding remnants of once mighty glaciers, of great
fields of sun-cupped snow, of turquoise lakes