than a mile long,
but presents, nevertheless, all the essential characters of large,
river-like glaciers--moraines, earth-bands, blue veins, crevasses,
etc., while the streams that issue from it are, of course, turbid with
rock-mud, showing its grinding action on its bed. And it is all the
more interesting since it is the highest and most enduring remnant of
the great Tuolumne Glacier, whose traces are still distinct fifty miles
away, and whose influence on the landscape was so profound. The McClure
Glacier, once a tributary of the Lyell, is smaller. Thirty-eight years
ago I set a series of stakes in it to determine its rate of motion.
Towards the end of summer in the middle of the glacier it was only a
little over an inch in twenty-four hours.

The trip to Mono from the Soda Springs can be made in a day, but many
days may profitably be spent near the shores of the lake, out on its
islands and about the volcanoes.

In making the trip down the Big Tuolumne Canyon, animals may be led as
far as a small, grassy, forested lake-basin that lies below the crossing
of the Virginia Creek trail. And from this point any one accustomed to
walking on earthquake boulders, carpeted with canyon chaparral, can
easily go down as far as the big cascades and return to camp in one day.
Many, however, are not able to do his, and it is better to go leisurely,
prepared to camp anywhere, and enjoy the marvelous grandeur of the
place.

The canyon begins near the lower end of the meadows and extends to the
Hetch Hetchy Valley, a distance of about eighteen miles, though it will
seem much longer to any one who scrambles through it. It is from twelve
hundred to about five thousand feet deep, and is comparatively narrow,
but there are several roomy, park-like openings in it, and throughout
its whole extent Yosemite natures are displayed on a grand scale--domes,
El Capitan rocks, gables, Sentinels, Royal Arches, Glacier Points,
Cathedral Spires, etc. There is even a Half Dome among its wealth of
rock forms, though far less sublime than the Yosemite Half Dome. Its
falls and cascades are innumerable. The sheer falls, except when the
snow is melting in early spring, are quite small in volume as compared
with those of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy; though in any other country
many of them would be regarded as wonders. But it is the cascades or
sloping falls on the main river that are the crowning glory of the
canyon, and these in volume, extent and variety