For 100 feet or so above the fall the ascent was made possible only by tough cushions of club-moss that clung to the rock.  Above this the ridge weathers away to a thin knife-blade for a few hundred yards, and thence to the summit of the range it carries a bristly mane of chaparral.  Here and there small openings occur on rocky places, commanding fine views across the cultivated valley to the ocean.  These I found by the tracks were favorite outlooks and resting-places for the wild animals—­bears, wolves, foxes, wildcats, etc.—­which abound here, and would have to be taken into account in the establishment of bee-ranches.  In the deepest thickets I found wood-rat villages—­groups of huts four to six feet high, built of sticks and leaves in rough, tapering piles, like musk-rat cabins.  I noticed a good many bees, too, most of them wild.  The tame honey-bees seemed languid and wing-weary, as if they had come all the way up from the flowerless valley.

After reaching the summit I had time to make only a hasty survey of the basin, now glowing in the sunset gold, before hastening down into one of the tributary canons in search, of water.  Emerging from a particularly tedious breadth of chaparral, I found myself free and erect in a beautiful park-like grove of Mountain Live Oak, where the ground was planted with aspidiums and brier-roses, while the glossy foliage made a close canopy overhead, leaving the gray dividing trunks bare to show the beauty of their interlacing arches.  The bottom of the canon was dry where I first reached it, but a bunch of scarlet mimulus indicated water at no great distance, and I soon discovered about a bucketful in a hollow of the rock.  This, however, was full of dead bees, wasps, beetles, and leaves, well steeped and simmered, and would, therefore, require boiling and filtering through fresh charcoal before it could be made available.  Tracing the dry channel about a mile farther down to its junction with a larger tributary canon, I at length discovered a lot of boulder pools, clear as crystal, brimming full, and linked together by glistening streamlets just strong enough to sing audibly.  Flowers in full bloom adorned their margins, lilies ten feet high, larkspur, columbines, and luxuriant ferns, leaning and overarching in lavish abundance, while a noble old Live Oak spread its rugged arms over all.  Here I camped, making my bed on smooth cobblestones.

[Illustration:  A BEE-KEEPER’S CABIN.—­BURRIELIA (ABOVE).—­MADIA (BELOW).]

Next day, in the channel of a tributary that heads on Mount San Antonio, I passed about fifteen or twenty gardens like the one in which I slept—­lilies in every one of them, in the full pomp of bloom.  My third camp was made near the middle of the general basin, at the head of a long system of cascades from ten to 200 feet high, one following the other in close succession down a rocky, inaccessible canon, making a total descent of nearly 1700 feet.  Above the cascades the main stream passes through a series of open, sunny levels, the largest of which are about an acre in size, where the wild bees and their companions were feasting on a showy growth of zauschneria, painted cups, and monardella; and gray squirrels were busy harvesting the burs of the Douglas Spruce, the only conifer I met in the basin.