ding on the pavement
where no fissure more than half an inch wide offered a hold for its
roots. The common height for these rock-dwellers is from ten to twenty
feet; most of the old ones have broken tops, and are mere stumps, with a
few tufted branches, forming picturesque brown pillars on bare
pavements, with plenty of elbow-room and a clear view in every
direction. On good moraine soil it reaches a height of from forty to
sixty feet, with dense gray foliage. The rings of the trunk are very
thin, eighty to an inch of diameter in some specimens I examined. Those
ten feet in diameter must be very old--thousands of years. Wish I could
live, like these junipers, on sunshine and snow, and stand beside them
on the shore of Lake Tenaya for a thousand years. How much I should see,
and how delightful it would be! Everything in the mountains would find
me and come to me, and everything from the heavens like light.

[Illustration: JUNIPERS IN TENAYA CANYON]

The lake was named for one of the chiefs of the Yosemite tribe. Old
Tenaya is said to have been a good Indian to his tribe. When a company
of soldiers followed his band into Yosemite to punish them for
cattle-stealing and other crimes, they fled to this lake by a trail that
leads out of the upper end of the valley, early in the spring, while the
snow was still deep; but being pursued, they lost heart and surrendered.
A fine monument the old man has in this bright lake, and likely to last
a long time, though lakes die as well as Indians, being gradually filled
with detritus carried in by the feeding streams, and to some extent also
by snow avalanches and rain and wind. A considerable portion of the
Tenaya basin is already changed into a forested flat and meadow at the
upper end, where the main tributary enters from Cathedral Peak. Two
other tributaries come from the Hoffman Range. The outlet flows westward
through Tenaya Canon to join the Merced River in Yosemite. Scarce a
handful of loose soil is to be seen on the north shore. All is bare,
shining granite, suggesting the Indian name of the lake, Pywiack,
meaning shining rock. The basin seems to have been slowly excavated by
the ancient glaciers, a marvelous work requiring countless thousands of
years. On the south side an imposing mountain rises from the water's
edge to a height of three thousand feet or more, feathered with hemlock
and pine; and huge shining domes on the east, over the tops of which the
grinding, wasting, m