erms of perpendicular
granite may find among Whitney's neighbors peaks which will present
harder problems than those offered abroad, peaks which themselves well
may become as celebrated in future years.

The John Muir Trail is destined to a fame and a use perhaps many times
as great as those men thought who conceived it as a memorial to a lover
of the trail, and of all that that implies. It will play a distinguished
part in the education of the nation in the love of mountains. It will
win artists to a phase of the sublime in America which they have
overlooked. It will bring students to the classrooms where Nature
displays her most tremendous exhibits.

Nevertheless, Roosevelt's lower levels will draw many times as many
devotees as will the High Sierra; and these visitors will stay longer.
It is the valleys and the canyons which will prove the greatest lure,
for here one may camp leisurely and in entire comfort, and thence make
what trips he chooses into the regions of the peaks and the cirques.

There are literally thousands of canyons and of many kinds. Besides the
Kern Canyon there are two which must rank with Yosemite. In the summer
of 1916 I travelled the length of the park, as far as the Giant Forest,
with a party led by Director Stephen T. Mather, of the National Park
Service, then Assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, and was
powerfully impressed with the scenic qualities of the Tehipite Valley,
and the Kings River Canyon, at that time little known.

Time will not dim my memory of Tehipite Dome, the august valley and the
leaping, singing river which it overlooks. Well short of the Yosemite
Valley in the kind of beauty that plunges the observer into silence,
the Tehipite Valley far excels it in bigness, power, and majesty.
Lookout Point on the north rim, a couple of miles south of the Dome,
gave us our first sensation. Three thousand feet above the river, it
offered by far the grandest valley view I have looked upon, for the rim
view into Yosemite by comparison is not so grand as it is beautiful.

The canyon revealed itself to the east as far as Mount Woodworth, its
lofty diversified walls lifting precipitously from the heavy forests of
the floor and sides, and yielding to still greater heights above.
Enormous cliffs abutted, Yosemite-like, at intervals. South of us,
directly across the canyon, rose the strenuous heights of the Monarch
Divide, Mount Harrington, towering a thousand feet higher above the