BY FRENCH STROTHER YOSEMITE VALLEY in, mid-winter! That is a sight that few have enjoyed but the hardy old pioneers like John Muir, who could risk weeks of delay in the snow to achieve it. But in the summer of 1907 a railroad was completed from Merced to the boundary of the Yosemite National Park at El Portal, and Yosemite Valley is now as accessible the year round as the Grand Canyon a short side trip by train from two transcontinental railroads. A party of us made the trip last February, when the contrast of the plains and mountains is sharpest. It was a wonderful transition, in a brief ten hours, from the summer mildness of the San Joaquin Valley, where almond trees in blossom dazzled white against Italian skies, to winter snow in the alpine heights of the Sierra Nevada. Leaving the treeless plain at Merced, the railroad joins the Merced River where it issues from the foothills, and thence into the Yosemite the whole trip is beside the stream, ascending a canyon that grows, at every turn, deeper and wilder and more densely forested and more beautiful. This canyon of the Merced is romantic ground. Every foot of the river bed is heaped with stones upturned in early days in search of gold, for this river was the El Dorado Creek of California in its day. It is rich yet, and a few picturesque old miners still work with pick and pan the claims that have supported them for more than thirty years. For four miles along one side of the gorge runs a road built by General Fremont, the explorer, along the river frontage of his grant from the Mexican government a princely domain that is still held intact by his heirs. At El Portal the railroad ends, and the remaining twelve miles are made by stage, in four hours just long enough to get into the mountaineering frame of mind before entering the valley. The stage driver has a joke for every turn in the road, for every peculiar rock formation, for every waterfall. He knows exactly where you will ask a certain question, and he has a particular expression of face and a dry answer all ready for you when you ask it. He will raise you expertly over ninety-nine "thank-you-marms" in the road, poising the stage an instant on their crests, and dropping you down as gently as if you were on cushion tires and at the one hundredth he will let you down with a crash that drives your spine up through the roof of your head and the breath out of your body, while it squeezes only a grunt of galling and superlative mirth out of him. He is the picturesque, open- air, days-of-'49 element of the trip, that supplies the suggestion of " roughing it" without which all hill excursions i would be tame and profitless. But if you are in another mood, you will prefer to sit on the back seat of the open stage, and watch the sunlit gorge of the Merced River at El Portal grow deep and dim and ' darker and more roaring, and see the mountain walls grow steeper and taller and more pent-in and savage, and the trees and rocks rise to more majestic heights, and let your spirits soar and expand with the beauty and the grandeur and the overwhelming bigness of Nature. And then you round a curve in the road, and in a gasping instant at your left El Capitan leaps upward from the summit of your highest gaze before, and soars and soars as your head tilts farther and farther back until your eyes have climbed its sheer, bald granite front to where its crest leans over you, 3,300 feet above your head and you are in the Yosemite. Very few of the thousands who have seen Half Dome have seen it covered with a snow-cap on which the last sun at dusk rests in a glow of rose-pink light. Not many have seen the foot of Yosemite Falls a towering glacier of ice, a hundred feet in height. Not many have seen the boughs of its pine forest bent beneath a load of glistening snow that traced each limb out in a shimmering lacework of gorgeous white. And fewer still have slipped out from beside a roaring fire, on to the moonlit floor of the Yosemite, and looked up at stars that flamed with a light so brilliant that you could almost hear them crackling in the sky; and seen Yosemite Falls swishing white in the moonlight, and Sentinel Rock standing out clean-cut against the black south wall; and felt the creepy sensation that those sheer three-thousand-foot precipices above were whispering together a plot to nod their heads and come crashing down in a thunderous avalanche, just for the sake of adding a little excitement to the Sabbath stillness of the night. In summer, when the snow is gone and everything is green, the outlines of one mountain shade off into the color of the next, so that the effect is of a blurred and indeterminate succession of rounded woodlands. But with the winter's white carpet over all, each rock and tree and mountain profile stands sharply out in brilliant contrasts of light and shadow; each peak is an individual, solitary and apart the distance of its separation from its neighbors clearly marked in the clean air, so that the grand effect is of a mighty council of independent giants, robed in white. This brilliancy of out- line and perspective is a prime beauty of the winter view. As we took the trails a fresh beauty of the winter scene met us at every turning. Up the gorge of the Merced toward Vernal Fall, the east wall was a towering slope of white, with green pines outlined against it, and, at the centre, a misty line drawn down where Illilluouette descends; and, toward the summit, the whole was softened in a blue haze of distance. On the other side of the valley, the trail to Eagle Rock carried us up the north wall to a point where all the valley lay exposed below us, shining with snow, and surrounded by snow-clad peak on peak, that gleamed whiter and whiter until the most distant spires seemed shafts of marble glowing in the sun. And the next morning we were back among the almond
blossoms in the summer mildness of the San Joaquin.
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