up under the highest elevations. There it
cooled. Thousands of centuries later, when erosion had worn away these
mountain crests, there lay revealed the solid granite core which frost
and glacier have since transformed into the bristling ramparts of
to-day's landscape.

II

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, MIDDLE EASTERN CALIFORNIA. AREA, 1,125 SQUARE
MILES

The first emotion inspired by the sight of Yosemite is surprise. No
previous preparation makes the mind ready for the actual revelation. The
hardest preliminary reading and the closest study of photographs, even
familiarity with other mountains as lofty, or loftier, fail to dull
one's first astonishment.

Hard on the heels of astonishment comes realization of the park's
supreme beauty. It is of its own kind, without comparison, as individual
as that of the Grand Canyon or the Glacier National Park. No single
visit will begin to reveal its sublimity; one must go away and return to
look again with rested eyes. Its devotees grow in appreciative enjoyment
with repeated summerings. Even John Muir, life student, interpreter, and
apostle of the Sierra, confessed toward the close of his many years that
the Valley's quality of loveliness continued to surprise him at each
renewal.

And lastly comes the higher emotion which is born of knowledge. It is
only when one reads in these inspired rocks the stirring story of their
making that pleasure reaches its fulness. The added joy of the
collector upon finding that the unsigned canvas, which he bought only
for its beauty, is the lost work of a great master, and was associated
with the romance of a famous past is here duplicated. Written history
never was more romantic nor more graphically told than that which Nature
has inscribed upon the walls of these vast canyons, domes and monoliths
in a language which man has learned to read.

I

The Yosemite National Park lies on the western slope of the Sierra
Nevada Mountains in California, nearly east of San Francisco. The snowy
crest of the Sierra, bellying irregularly eastward to a climax among the
jagged granites and gale-swept glaciers of Mount Lyell, forms its
eastern boundary. From this the park slopes rapidly thirty miles or more
westward to the heart of the warm luxuriant zone of the giant sequoias.
This slope includes in its eleven hundred and twenty-five square miles
some of the highest scenic examples in the wide gamut of Sierra
grandeu