There was one picture in murky monochrome which never could be forgottena long sierra of broken pinnacles and crags which had all the semblance of a weathered and dismantled castle.

Toward the close of the glacial period, when the snow-clouds became less fertile and the melting waste of sunshine became greater, the lower folds of the ice-sheet in California, discharging fleets of icebergs into the sea, began to shallow and recede from the lowlands, and then move slowly up the flanks of the Sierra in compliance with the changes of climate.

The changes that have taken place in the glacial conditions of the Sierra from the time of greatest extension is well illustrated by the series of glaciers of every size and form extending along the mountains of the coast to Alaska.

Many groves and thickets would undoubtedly have grown up on lake and avalanche beds, and many a fair flower and shrub would have found food and a dwelling-place in weathered nooks and crevices, but the Sierra as a whole would have been a bare, rocky desert.

This species is restricted in the Sierra to the southern portion of the range, about the head waters of Kings and Kern rivers, where it forms extensive forests, and in some places accompanies the Dwarf Pine to the extreme limit of tree-growth.

This comrade came over the Sierra by the Carson Valley Pass, and declared that a spot in the Pass exactly answered his description.

Golden composite covered all the ground from the Coast Range to the Sierra like a stratum of curdled sunshine, in which I reveled for weeks, watching the rising and setting of their innumerable suns; then I gave myself up to be borne forward on the crest of the summer wave that sweeps annually up the Sierra and spends itself on the snowy summits.

(Baedeker.) "Toledo, on its hillside, with the tawny half-circle of the Tagus at its feet, has the color, the roughness, the haughty poverty of the sierra on which it is built, and whose strong articulations from the very first produce an impression of energy and passion."

I have seen large numbers of heads and horns in the caves of Mount Shasta and the Modoc lava-beds, where the Indians had been feasting in stormy weather; also in the cañons of the Sierra opposite Owen's Valley; while the heavy obsidian arrow-heads found on some of the highest peaks show that this warfare has long been going on.

Nothing is more commonly remarked by noisy, dusty trail-travelers in the Sierra than the want of animal lifeno song-birds, no deer, no squirrels, no game of any kind, they say.

I was usually driven down out of the High Sierra about the end of November, but the winter of 1874 and 1875 was so warm and calm that I was tempted to seek general views of the geology and topography of the basin of Feather River in January.

He ascended first to the port and territory of Careta, where he was received with demonstrations of regard and welcome suitable to his relations with that cacique, and, leaving his squadron there, took his way by the sierras toward the dominion of Ponca.

It so happened by chance that, on the night previous to the day fixed for the attack, thirty of the soldiers who had crossed the sierra against the cannibals were sent back to relieve the garrison left at Rio Negro, in case of attack, and also because the Spaniards were suspicious.

A telegraphic wire has already wound its way over the sierra among them, and will soon palpitate through Salt Lake City in its progress toward the Atlantic.

After the toil-worn adventurers had escaped a thousand dangers and had crawled thousands of miles across the plains the snowy Sierra at last loomed in sight, the eastern wall of the land of gold.

Behind the San Bernardino Range lies the wild "sage-brush country," bounded on the east by the Colorado River, and extending in a general northerly direction to Nevada and along the eastern base of the Sierra beyond Mono Lake.