Down The Yosemite Creek
In general views the Yosemite Creek basin
seems to be paved with
domes and smooth, whaleback masses of granite in every stage of
development--some showing only their crowns; others rising high and
free
above the girdling forests, singly or in groups. Others are developed
only on one side, forming bold outstanding bosses usually well fringed
with shrubs and trees, and presenting the polished surfaces given them
by the glacier that brought them into relief. On the upper portion of
the basin broad moraine beds have been deposited and on these fine,
thrifty forests are growing. Lakes and meadows and small spongy bogs
may be found hiding here and there in the woods or back in the fountain
recesses of Mount Hoffman, while a thousand gardens are planted along
the banks of the streams.
All the wide, fan-shaped upper portion of
the basin is covered with a
network of small rills that go cheerily on their way to their grand
fall
in the Valley, now flowing on smooth pavements in sheets thin as glass,
now diving under willows and laving their red roots, oozing through
green, plushy bogs, plashing over small falls and dancing down slanting
cascades, calming again, gliding through patches of smooth glacier
meadows with sod of alpine agrostis mixed with blue and white violets
and daisies, breaking, tossing among rough boulders and fallen trees,
resting in calm pools, flowing together until, all united, they go to
their fate with stately, tranquil gestures like a full-grown river. At
the crossing of the Mono Trail, about two miles above the head of the
Yosemite Fall, the stream is nearly forty feet wide, and when the snow
is melting rapidly in the spring it is about four feet deep, with a
current of two and a half miles an hour. This is about the volume of
water that forms the Fall in May and June when there had been much snow
the preceding winter; but it varies greatly from month to month. The
snow rapidly vanishes from the open portion of the basin, which faces
southward, and only a few of the tributaries reach back to perennial
snow and ice fountains in the shadowy amphitheaters on the precipitous
northern slopes of Mount Hoffman. The total descent made by the stream
from its highest sources to its confluence with the Merced in the
Valley
is about 6000 feet, while the distance is only about ten miles, an
average fall of 600 feet per mile. The last mile of its course lies
between the sides of sunken domes and swelling folds of the granite
that
are clustered and pressed together like a mass of bossy cumulus clouds.
Through this shining way Yosemite Creek goes to its fate, swaying and
swirling with easy, graceful gestures and singing the last of its
mountain songs before it reaches the dizzy edge of Yosemite to fall
2600
feet into another world, where climate, vegetation, inhabitants, all
are
different. Emerging from this last cañon the stream glides, in
flat
lace-like folds, down a smooth incline into a small pool where it seems
to rest and compose itself before taking the grand plunge. Then calmly,
as if leaving a lake, it slips over the polished lip of the pool down
another incline and out over the brow of the precipice in a magnificent
curve thick-sown with rainbow spray.
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