Preview
Circa Date
circa 1887
Transcription
12
edged with two leaved pines & their damp borders close to the stream are covered with azalea spiraea grasses sedges daisies & violets
These (beds) flats are formed of water washed moraine material boulders pebbles & sand, leveled by flood waters early in the history of the basin when the glaciers that occupied it were melting, but the floods of the present time seldom stir them (any part of its deposits to an appreciable extent) as is shown by the undisturbed pines hundreds of years old growing upon [it] them. Wherever these flats are low enough to be well watered they are occupied by dense groves of 2-lvd [two-leaved] pine through which we grope our way as through a cane-break
Pines
No other pine grows so slender & cane-like or grass-like
There is a specimen near a hundred feet long which you may span at the base with your two hands. Their slim reeds of trees could not long stand alone. They lean upon one another when swayed by the wind like fields of (tall waving) grain.
A lake bed filled in with (plenty of) fat alluvium on top of gravel & well watered from beneath (makes) yields the finest crops of this slender pine
13
Tracing the stream through these groves & gardens we find that its size is maintained for a distance of about 10 miles the trunk scarce tapering or giving off any considerable branch then it suddenly sends forth (long) its tributary branches (that) radiating in every direction, the longest (running) extending back behind the Hoffmann Range to perennial fountains of snow & ice (of moderate extent).
General View of Yo [Yosemite] Creek
Now that we have traced After tracing (all) the (radiating) affluents [effluents] to their sources & examining its lakes & gardens & domes & precipitous cliffs etc let us now endeavor to get a general view of it (a more striking kind, a view from top to base all) from one stand point as if it were a tree (with all its branches not embedded in trees & rocks but) standing erect in the light. It would look like a great elm about (20) 15 miles high (&) with wide spreading boughs. Looking at it just as a botanist after studying a tree in detail examining its foliage & fruit, bark etc climbing among its branches walking around it might turn as he was going away to take a last general view of it from a little distance to study its physiognomy
Date Occurred
1872-1874
Resource Identifier
MuirReel32 Notebook01 Img009.Jpeg
Contributing Institution
Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library
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