IV

One cannot look upon Yosemite or walk beneath its towering walls without the question arising in his mind, How did all this happen?  What were the agents that brought it about?  There has been a great geologic drama enacted here; who or what were the star actors?  There are two other valleys in this part of the Sierra, Hetch-Hetchy and King’s River, that are almost identical in their main features, though the Merced Yosemite is the widest of the three.  Each of them is a tremendous chasm in the granite rock, with nearly vertical walls, domes, El Capitans, and Sentinel and Cathedral Rocks, and waterfalls—­all modeled on the same general plan.  I believe there is nothing just like this trio of Yosemites anywhere else on the globe.

Guided by one’s ordinary sense or judgment alone, one’s judgment as developed and disciplined by the everyday affairs of life and the everyday course of nature, one would say on beholding Yosemite that here is the work of exceptional and extraordinary agents or world-building forces.  It is as surprising and exceptional as would be a cathedral in a village street, or a gigantic sequoia in a grove of our balsam firs.  The approach to it up the Merced River does not prepare one for any such astonishing spectacle as awaits one.  The rushing, foaming water amid the tumbled confusion of huge granite rocks and the open V-shaped valley, are nothing very remarkable or unusual.  Then suddenly you are on the threshold of this hall of the elder gods.  Demons and furies might lurk in the valley below, but here is the abode of the serene, beneficent Olympian deities.  All is so calm, so hushed, so friendly, yet so towering, so stupendous, so unspeakably beautiful.  You are in a mansion carved out of the granite foundations of the earth, with walls two or three thousand feet high, hung here and there with snow-white waterfalls, and supporting the blue sky on domes and pinnacles still higher.  Oh, the calmness and majesty of the scene! the evidence of such tremendous activity of some force, some agent, and now so tranquil, so sheltering, so beneficent!

That there should be two or three Yosemites in the Sierra not very far apart, all with the main features singularly alike, is very significant—­as if this kind of valley was latent in the granite of that region—­some peculiarity of rock structure that lends itself readily to these formations.  The Sierra lies beyond the southern limit of the great continental ice-sheet of late Tertiary times, but it nursed and reared many local glaciers, and to the eroding power of these its Yosemites are partly due.  But water was at work here long before the ice—­eating down into the granite and laying open the mountain for the ice to begin its work.  Ice may come, and ice may go, says the river, but I go on forever.  Water tends to make a V-shaped valley, ice a U-shaped one, though in the Hawaiian Islands, where water erosion