appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the
Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of
pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one
rich furred garden of yellow Compositoe. And from the eastern boundary
of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height,
and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with
light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.
Along the top and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-gray belt
of snow; below it a belt of blue and lark purple, marking the extension
of the forests; and stretching long the base of the range a broad belt
of rose-purple; all these colors, from the blue sky to the yellow
valley smoothly blending as they do in a rainbow, making a wall of light
ineffably fine. Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called,
not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten
years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its
glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming
through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the
flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls,
it still seems above all others the Range of Light.

In general views no mark of man is visible upon it, nor any thing to
suggest the wonderful depth and grandeur of its sculpture. None of its
magnificent forest-crowned ridges seems to rise mud above the general
level to publish its wealth. No great valley or river is seen, or group
of well-marked features of any kind standing out as distinct pictures.
Even the summit peaks, marshaled in glorious array so high in the sky,
seem comparatively regular in form. Nevertheless the whole range five
hundred miles long is furrowed with canyons 2000 to 5000 feet deep, in
which once flowed majestic glaciers, and in which now flow and sing the
bright rejoicing rivers.