horseback, accompanied by a guide leading a pack animal with
provision, blankets, and other necessaries, you follow a trail that
leads up to the edge of the timberline, where you camp for the night,
eight or ten miles from the hotel, at an elevation of about ten
thousand feet. The next day, rising early, you may push on to the
summit and return to Sisson's. But it is better to spend more time in
the enjoyment of the grand scenery on the summit and about the head of
the Whitney Glacier, pass the second night in camp, and return to
Sisson's on the third day. Passing around the margin of the meadows
and on through the zones of the forest, you will have good
opportunities to get ever-changing views of the mountain and its
wealth of creatures that bloom and breathe.

The woods differ but little from those that clothe the mountains to
the southward, the trees being slightly closer together and generally
not quite so large, marking the incipient change from the open sunny
forests of the Sierra to the dense damp forests of the northern coast,
where a squirrel may travel in the branches of the thick-set trees
hundreds of miles without touching the ground. Around the upper belt
of the forest you may see gaps where the ground has been cleared by
avalanches of snow, thousands of tons in weight, which, descending
with grand rush and roar, brush the trees from their paths like so
many fragile shrubs or grasses.

At first the ascent is very gradual. The mountain begins to leave the
plain in slopes scarcely perceptible, measuring from two to three
degrees. These are continued by easy gradations mile after mile all
the way to the truncated, crumbling summit, where they attain a
steepness of twenty to twenty-five degrees. The grand simplicity of
these lines is partially interrupted on the north subordinate cone