Can you tell which season you like the best?  You will find the one you choose in some part of this favored state.  It is always summer in the south, and you may slide on the ice or throw snowballs all year in the high Sierras.

SOME WONDERFUL SIGHTS

California is a wonderland where snowy mountains, mighty and ancient forests, glaciers and geysers, lakes and waterfalls, foaming rivers and the cliffs and rolling surf down her long sea-coast give new and beautiful pictures at every place.

Through the whole state stretches the granite backbone of the Sierra Nevadas with its highest crest or ridge at the head-waters of the Kings and Kern rivers near Fresno.  Here Mount Whitney and a dozen other great peaks of the High Sierras or California Alps lift their heads over thirteen thousand feet in the air.  Here are to be seen most magnificent panoramas of lofty peaks, deep canons, towering domes, and snow-clad summits.  The finest forests, too, in the world grow on the slopes of the Sierras, the immense pines and giant sequoias of the General Grant and other National Parks in this section being the largest and oldest of all.  Kings River Canon is a rugged gorge half a mile deep with the river rushing through it in thundering rapids and cascades.

The well-known Yosemite Valley is the gorge of the Merced River and, though only eight miles long and half a mile wide, holds the grandest of all our mountain scenery.  The mighty rock El Capitan, over three thousand feet in height, stands at the entrance to the valley, and across from it is Bridal Veil Fall, a snowy cascade so thin you can see the face of the mountain through the falling waters.  There are many waterfalls, but the Yosemite is chief of them all.  Here the river takes a plunge of sixteen hundred feet, the water falling like snowy rockets bursting into spray from that great height.

Then, for six hundred feet more, the torrent leaps and foams through a trench it has cut out of the solid rock to the cliff, from which it takes a second plunge.  This Lower Yosemite fall is four hundred feet high, the rushing waters turning into clouds of spray, which the wind tosses from side to side.  At Nevada Fall the Merced River leaps six hundred feet at a bound, strikes a mass of rocks halfway down, and breaks into white foam upon which rainbows play when the sun shines through the misty veil.

Besides the grand Sentinel Rock, Eagle Peak, Clouds’ Rest, and other high mountains in the Yosemite Valley, many domes or round-topped peaks like the heads of buried giants loom up, the most famous being South Dome, Washington Column, Liberty Cap, and Mount Broderick.