Correspondence of the Tribune, 1859.

THE NIGHT was clear and bright, as all summer nights in this region are; the atmosphere cool, but not really cold; the moon had risen before seven o’clock, and was shedding so much light as to bother us in our forest path, where the shadow of a standing pine looked exceedingly like the substance of a fallen one, and many semblances were unreal and misleading. The safest course was to give your horse a full rein, and trust to his sagacity or self-love for keeping the trail.

  As we descended by zigzags the north face of the all but perpendicular mountain, our moonlight soon left us, or was present only by reflection from the opposite cliff. Soon the trail became at once so steep, so rough, and so tortuous, that we all dismounted; but my attempt at walking proved a miserable failure. I had been riding with a bad Mexican stirrup, which barely admitted the toes of my left foot, and continual pressure on these had sprained and swelled them so that walking was positive torture. I persisted in the attempt till my companions insisted on my remounting; and thus floundering slowly to the bottom.

  By steady effort we descended the three miles (four thousand feet perpendicular) in two hours, and stood at midnight by the rushing, roaring waters of the Mercede.

  That first full, deliberate gaze up the opposite height! can I ever forget it? The valley is here scarcely half a mile wide, while its northern wall of mainly naked, perpendicular granite is at least four thousand feet high, probably more. But the modicum of moonlight that fell into this awful gorge gave to that precipice a vagueness of outline, an indefinite vastness, a ghostly and weird spirituality. Had the mountain spoken to me in audible voice, or begun to lean over with the purpose of burying me beneath its crushing mass, I should hardly have been surprised. Its whiteness, thrown into bold relief by the patches of trees or shrubs, which fringed or flecked it wherever a few handfuls of its moss, slowly decomposed to earth, could contrive to hold on, continually suggested the presence of snow, which suggestion, with difficulty reputed, was at once renewed. And looking up the valley we saw just such mountain precipices, barely separated by intervening water courses (mainly dry at this season) of inconsiderable depth, and only receding sufficiently to make room for a very narrow meadow inclosing the river, to the furthest limit of vision….

  The Fall of the Yosemite, so called, is a humbug. It is not the Mercede River that makes this fall, but a mere tributary trout brook, which pitches in from the north by a barely once broken descent of 2,600 feet, while the Mercede enters the valley at its eastern extremity, over the Falls of 600 and 250 feet. But a river thrice as large as the Mercede at this season would be utterly dwarfed by all the other accessories of this prodigious chasm. Only a Mississippi or a Niagara could be adequate to their exactions.

  I readily concede that a hundred times the present amount of water may roll down the Yosemite Fall in the months of May and June, when the snows are melting from the central ranges of the Sierra Nevada, which bound this abyss on the east; but this would not add a fraction to the wonder of this vivid exemplification of the Divine power and majesty.

  At present, the little streams that leap down the Yosemite, and are all but shattered to mist by the amazing descent, look more like a tapeline let down from the cloud-capped height to measure the depth of the abyss.

  The Yosemite Valley (or gorge) is the most unique and majestic of nature’s marvels; but the Yosemite Fall is of little account. Were it absent, the valley would not be perceptibly less worthy of a fatiguing visit.

  We traversed the valley from end to end next day, but an accumulation of details on such a subject only serves to confuse and blunt the observer’s powers of perception and appreciation.

  Perhaps the visitor who should be content with a long look into the abyss from the most convenient height, without having the toil of a descent, would be wiser than all of us; and yet that first glance upward from the foot will long haunt me as more impressive than any look downward from the summit could be.

  I shall not multiply details, not waste paper in noting all the foolish names which foolish people have given to different peaks or turrets. Just think of two giant stone towers or pillars, which rise a thousand feet above the towering cliff which forms their base, being styled “The Two Sisters!”

  Could anything be more maladroit and lackadaisical?

  “The Dome” is a high, round, naked peak, which rises between the Mercede and its little tributary from the inmost recesses of the Sierra Nevada already instanced, and which towers to an altitude of over five thousand feet above the waters of its base. Picture to yourself a perpendicular wall of bare granite, nearly or quite a mile high.

  Yet there are some dozen or score of peaks in all, ranging from three thousand to five thousand feet above the valley; and a biscuit, tossed from any of them would strike very near its base, and its fragments go bounding and falling still further.

  I certainly miss here the glaciers of Chamouni; but I know no single wonder of nature on earth which can claim a superiority over the Yosemite. Just dream yourself for one hour in a chasm nearly ten miles long, with egress for birds and water out either extremity, and none elsewhere save at three points, up the face of precipices from three thousand to four thousand feet high, the chasm scarcely more than a mile wide at any point, and tapering to a mere gorge or canon at either end, with walls of mainly naked and perpendicular white granite, from three thousand to five thousand feet high, so that looking up to the sky from it is like looking out of an unfathomable profound, and you will have some conception of the Yosemite.