of '49 and later unearthed it by their
gigantic hydraulic nozzles. Millions of dollars were extracted from
these placers, but now the villages are deserted and all mining
operations have ceased. The time is not far distant when automobile
parties will arrange to stop over in one of these little places, and
with a competent guide, go over the deserted placers. It is hard to
realize that by the mere power of water mountains were washed away,
leaving the denuded country on the one hand, a land of mounds and
hummocks, like the Bad Lands in miniature, and on the other hand of
masses of debris, too heavy to be washed away into the streams.

The wildest portions of the Sierras are revealed in ascending from
Dutch Flat to the Summit. The snowsheds of the Southern Pacific
Railway come into sight, perched like peculiar long black boxes, with
peep-holes, along an impossible ledge of the massive granite cliffs,
and the Sierran trees tower upright from every possible vantage ground
in the granite beneath.

At Towle, three miles beyond Dutch Flat, the shipping point is reached
from which much of the material was hauled for the building of Lake
Spaulding dam. Hundreds of teams were employed in this work, and the
road showed an almost unbroken procession for months. This was in
1912-13. A side trip to this remarkable dam, impounding the waters of
the High Sierras for the generation of electric power to be used not
only in the Sacramento Valley but in far away San Francisco, cannot
fail to be of interest. The area of the Lake, with the dam at its
present elevation, is such as to justify the assertion that it is next
to if not the largest artificial lake in the world.

_Emigrant Gap to Cisco, 14 Miles_.--Fourteen miles from Towle,
after enjoying the rich blue haze of Blue Canyon, the road passes
through the natural Sierran pass at Emigrant Gap which gives its name
to the route. Here one who has not been over the road before must not
fail to note the following: As he passes through the Gap the massive
granite wall towers in dominant power to the right and leads one to
feel that miles of rugged peaks are there. _Yet not more than a
hundred yards farther on_, the wall fades away, and if he stops
here, and turns off the road slightly to the right, he will glimpse
a vision of glory and sublimity that will take away his breath. Here,
from a thousand or two thousand feet almost sheer above it, one gazes
down to where in peaceful repose lies