it, its banks rounded
and beveled with a thatch of dipping sedges. The flat is named after the
two-leaved pine (_Pinus contorta_, var. _Murrayana_), common here,
especially around the cool margin of the meadow. On rocky ground it is a
rough, thickset tree, about forty to sixty feet high and one to three
feet in diameter, bark thin and gummy, branches rather naked, tassels,
leaves, and cones small. But in damp, rich soil it grows close and
slender, and reaches a height at times of nearly a hundred feet.
Specimens only six inches in diameter at the ground are often fifty or
sixty feet in height, as slender and sharp in outline as arrows, like
the true tamarack (larch) of the Eastern States; hence the name, though
it is a pine.

_July 11._ The Don has gone ahead on one of the pack animals to spy out
the land to the north of Yosemite in search of the best point for a
central camp. Much higher than this we cannot now go, for the upper
pastures, said to be better than any hereabouts, are still buried in
heavy winter snow. Glad I am that camp is to be fixed in the Yosemite
region, for many a glorious ramble I'll have along the top of the walls,
and then what landscapes I shall find with their new mountains and
canyons, forests and gardens, lakes and streams and falls.

We are now about seven thousand feet above the sea, and the nights are
so cool we have to pile coats and extra clothing on top of our blankets.
Tamarack Creek is icy cold, delicious, exhilarating champagne water. It
is flowing bank-full in the meadow with silent speed, but only a few
hundred yards below our camp the ground is bare gray granite strewn with
boulders, large spaces being without a single tree or only a small one
here and there anchored in narrow seams and cracks. The boulders, many
of them very large, are not in piles or scattered like rubbish among
loose crumbling debris as if weathered out of the solid as boulders of
disintegration; they mostly occur singly, and are lying on a clean
pavement on which the sunshine falls in a glare that contrasts with the
shimmer of light and shade we have been accustomed to in the leafy
woods. And, strange to say, these boulders lying so still and deserted,
with no moving force near them, no boulder carrier anywhere in sight,
were nevertheless brought from a distance, as difference in color and
composition shows, quarried and carried and laid down here each in its
place; nor have they stirred, most of them, throug