The time for this kind of work was nearly over for the year, and I began
to look forward with delight to the approaching winter with its wondrous
storms, when I would be warmly snow-bound in my Yosemite cabin with
plenty of bread and books; but a tinge of regret came on when I
considered that possibly I might not see this favorite region again
until the next summer, excepting distant views from the heights about
the Yosemite walls.
To artists, few portions of the High Sierra are, strictly speaking,
picturesque. The whole massive uplift of the range is one great picture,
not clearly divisible into smaller ones; differing much in this respect
from the older, and what may be called, riper mountains of the Coast
Range. All the landscapes of the Sierra, as we have seen, were born
again, remodeled from base to summit by the developing ice-floods of the
last glacial winter. But all those new landscapes were not brought forth
simultaneously; some of the highest, where the ice lingered longest, are
tens of centuries younger than those of the warmer regions below them.
In general, the younger the mountain-landscapes,--younger, I mean, with
reference to the time of their emergence from the ice of the glacial
period,--the less separable are they into artistic bits capable of being
made into warm, sympathetic, lovable pictures with appreciable humanity
in them.
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