red us on our way. Soon we struck the road and
followed it until we came to the headwaters of Miller's Creek on the
right. Miller used to run sheep up in the meadows, which afford a
smooth grade for the road for some distance. There are many alders
here, which bear mute though powerful testimony, in the shape of their
gnarled and bent over ground-groveling trunks, of the heavy winters'
snows.

These meadows clearly were once glacial lakes, now filled up, and
Miller's Creek was the instrument of their destruction. Crossing the
last of the meadows we came to Burton's Pass, so called from H.D.
Burton, another Placerville pioneer who used to cut hay here, pack it
on mules to McKinney's, and then ship it across to Lakeside, where he
sold it for $80 to $100 a ton. We then passed McKinney's old cabin,
the place he built and occupied in 1863, before he went to live at the
Lake. Only a few fragments now remain, time and storms having nearly
completed the work of destruction.

Nearby was a beautiful lily pond, soon to be a meadow, and just beyond
this we stood on the actual divide between the Great Basin and the
Pacific. We were at the head of Phipps Creek, named on the map General
Creek, from General Phipps. At the mouth of the creek this pioneer
located on 160 acres, which, when he died about 1883, was sold to M.H.
de Young, of the _San Francisco Chronicle_. After holding it for
many years he sold it in turn to I. Hellman, the banker, who now uses
it as his summer estate, having built a fine residence upon it.

Near here we lunched at a sheep-herder's camp and heard an interesting
story of the relocation of an old mine that had helped create the
Squaw Valley excitement forty years before. Owing to new and improved
methods of extracting the precious metal it is now deemed that this
may soon develop into a paying property.

Returning to the road we passed Jock Ellis's cabin, in a similar state
of ruin to that of McKinney. Ellis Peak (8945 feet) is named after
him. He was a Squaw Valley stampeder. Nearby we saw the largest
tamarack I have yet found in the Sierras. It was fully five feet
through and fluted in an interesting and peculiar fashion.

From here we made a mile detour to visit Hank Richards Lake, a
beautiful crystal jewel in an incomparable wooded setting. Then
back to Phipps Creek, over a perfect jumble of granite bowlders and
tree-clad slopes until we finally struck the trail and followed it to
the Lake, and thenc