Yosemite Trails was ostensibly a guide book, but I expect that if I were getting it for that purpose, I'd be rather disappointed. It's rather like the posts on my own blog in that it describes the route that was taken including remarks about the quality of the trail and excellence of a campsite. Sometimes options are mentioned. When an opportunity arises, a little camp etiquette might get thrown in. However, he even spends a week of one trip not knowing for sure where he is. It is actually a story of traveling the trails of Yosemite. The first part contains a couple small stories plus a circumnavigation of the rim. The second part goes further afield in traveling the high country near the park. Published in 1911, he describes a familiar and unfamiliar place.
The Tioga road, which I should follow for some fifteen miles, is a rough track built in historic days by the owners of the once famous Tioga mine, which, long since abandoned, lies near the crest of the Sierra about twelve miles northeast of the meadows. For purposes of technical “control,” a wagon is still driven over it once a year by an adventurous teamster; and deserted cabins mark here and there the sites of “stations” such as Porcupine Flat, Dark Hole, White Wolf, and Aspen Valley.
Puts a rather unfamiliar look at a familiar road for any who visit today. Chase has a quiet enthusiasm in his writing, as well as an enthusiasm for conifers, both of which are on display in this:
I came upon aged firs seven or eight feet high, knotted and battered of body and leaning on their elbows, whose shivering branches grimly held up a score or two of cones and seemed to flourish them at the wind in scornful defiance. I could not refrain from crying “Go it!” to these heroes.
The one way in which the book does resemble a guide an entire chapter devoted to the conifers of the area and where to find them, plus a second chapter on just the sequoias with travel stories specific to them.
The fight against careless campers with fires was an old one. Although not quite as explicit, there is a suggestion not to leave rubish about a camp in this, too.
At a turn of the trail I came upon what appeared to be a camp. A considerable volume of smoke was rising from a little clearing which exhibited the usual ugly litter of cans and other rubbish. Some party had camped there and had neglected to extinguish their fire when they left. I was just in time to prevent a serious conflagration. A fallen log was burning in two places, and at every draw of wind blazed up fiercely, while the ground for a considerable distance around was smouldering threateningly. The animals, whom I had allowed to get some distance ahead, fortunately had decided that this was to be our camping-place, and were waiting for me. I hastily tied them, cut through the log with my axe, and hauled the burning end to the creek, into which I tumbled it. Then, stamping out the fire where it was eating its way through the thick matting of pine-needles, I cleared the ground around the smouldering portion, leaving a ring within which the fire, if it should revive, could burn itself out.
No penalty that could be exacted would be too severe for the offence against the public good which is committed by persons who, merely to avoid a few minutes’ work, will expose a tract of forest to the danger of destruction. Carelessness so selfish and so colossal rises to the dimension of crime.
And try not to be jealous that...
Suddenly there opened far below us a valley like another Yosemite, its cliffs, meadows, and winding river gleaming through the pearly summer haze. The white torrent of a waterfall could be plainly seen even at that distance, creeping down a great cliff on the northern side. I knew it at once as the Hetch-Hetchy.
he got to see Hetch-Hetchy.
I started reading the one I'd linked to in the previous "Winter Reading" post and found it to have some strange errors in the first chapter and more errors throughout, so I've put a bit of effort into proofing an electric copy of the book from materials on the Internet Archive which can be downloaded here.
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