This is indeed far removed. It seems farther away from you than any
place I have been to yet, except the frozen top of the volcano of Mauna
Loa. It is so little profaned by man that if one were compelled to
live here in solitude one might truly say of the bears, deer, and elk
which abound, "Their tameness is shocking to me." It is the world of
"big game." Just now a heavy-headed elk, with much-branched horns
fully three feet long, stood and looked at me, and then quietly trotted
away. He was so near that I heard the grass, crisp with hoar frost,
crackle under his feet. Bears stripped the cherry bushes within a few
yards of us last night. Now two lovely blue birds, with crests on
their heads, are picking about within a stone's-throw. This is "The
Great Lone Land," until lately the hunting ground of the Indians, and
not yet settled or traversed, or likely to be so, owing to the want of
water. A solitary hunter has built a log cabin up here, which he
occupies for a few weeks for the purpose of elk-hunting, but all the
region is unsurveyed, and mostly unexplored. It is 7 A.M. The sun has
not yet risen high enough to melt the hoar frost, and the air is clear,
bright, and cold. The stillness is profound. I hear nothing but the
far-off mysterious roaring of a river in a deep canyon, which we spent
two hours last night in trying to find. The horses are lost, and if I
were disposed to retort upon my companions the term they invariably
apply to me, I should now write, with bitter emphasis, "THAT man" and
"THAT woman" have gone in search of them.

The scenery up here is glorious, combining sublimity with beauty, and
in the elastic air fatigue has dropped off from me. This is no region
for tourists and women, only for a few elk and bear hunters at times,
and its unprofaned freshness gives me new life. I cannot by any words
give you an idea of scenery so different from any that you or I have
ever seen. This is an upland valley of grass and flowers, of glades
and sloping lawns, and cherry-fringed beds of dry streams, and clumps
of pines artistically placed, and mountain sides densely pine clad, the
pines breaking into fringes as they come down upon the "park," and the
mountains breaking into pinnacles of bold grey rock as they pierce the
blue of the sky. A single dell of bright green grass, on which dwarf
clumps of the scarlet poison oak look like beds of geraniums, slopes
towards the west, as if it must lead to t