To the mountain-lover the Tahoe region is an earthly paradise.  One summer I climbed over twenty peaks, each over nine thousand feet high, and all gave me glimpses of Tahoe.  Some of them went up close to 11,000 feet.

Are you an admirer of Alpine, nay, High Sierran, trees?  You will find all the well-known, and several rare and entirely new species in this region.  This field alone could well occupy a student, or a mere amateur tree-lover a whole summer in rambling, climbing, collecting and studying.

And as for geology—­the Grand Canyon of Arizona has afforded me nature reading material for nearly three decades and I am delighted by reading it yet.  Still I am free to confess the uplift of these high-sweeping Sierras, upon whose lofty summits

        The high-born, beautiful snow comes down,
        Silent and soft as the terrible feet
        Of Time on the mosses of ruins;

the great glacial cirques, with their stupendous precipices from which the vast ice-sheets started, which gouged, smoothed, planed and grooved millions of acres of solid granite into lake-beds, polished domes and canyon walls and carried along millions of tons of rock debris to make scores of lateral and terminal moraines; together with the evidences of uplift, subsidence and volcanic outpouring of diorite and other molten rocks, afford one as vast and enjoyable a field for contemplation as any ordinary man can find in the Grand Canyon.

But why compare them?  There is no need to do so.  Each is supreme in its own right; different yet compelling, unlike yet equally engaging.

Then there are the ineffable climate of summer, the sunrises, the sunsets, the Indians, the flowers, the sweet-singing birds, the rowing, in winter the snow-shoeing, the camping-out, and, alas!  I must say it—­the hunting.

Why man will hunt save for food is beyond me.  I deem it that every living thing has as much right to its life as I have to mine, but I find I am in a large minority among a certain class that finds at Lake Tahoe its hunting Mecca.  Deer abound, and grouse and quail are quite common, and in the summer of 1913 I knew of four bears being shot.

Is it necessary to present further claims for Lake Tahoe?  Every new hour finds a new charm, every new day calls for the louder praise, every added visit only fastens the chains of allurement deeper.  For instance, this is the day of athletic maids, as well as men.  We find them everywhere.  Very well!  Lake Tahoe is the physical culturist’s heaven.

In any one of its score of camps he may sleep out of doors, on the porch, out under the pines, by the side of the Lake or in his tent or cottage with open doors and windows.  At sunrise, or later, in his bathing suit, or when away from too close neighbors, clothed, as dear old Walt Whitman puts it, “in the natural and religious idea of nakedness,” the cold waters of the Lake invite him to a healthful