“It is only the vastness of the glacial pathways of this region that prevents their being seen and comprehended at once. A scholar might be puzzled with the English alphabet if it was written large enough, and, if each letter was made up of many smaller ones. The beds of those vast ice rivers are veiled with forests and a network of tiny water channels. You will see by the above sketch that Yosemite was completely overwhelmed with glaciers, and they did not come squeezing, groping down to the main valley by the narrow, angular, tortuous canyons of the Ten-ie-ya, Nevada or South canyons, but they flowed grandly and directly above all of its highest domes, like a steady wind, while their lower currents went mazing and swedging down in the crooking and dome-blocked channels of canyons. “Glaciers have made every mountain form of this whole region; even the summit mountains are only fragments of their pre-glacial selves. “Every summit wherein are laid the wombs of glaciers is steeper on its north than its south side, because of the depth and duration of sheltered glaciers, above those exposed to the sun, and this steepness between the north and south sides of summits is greater in the lower summits, as those of the Obelisk group. This tells us a word of glacial climate. Such mountains as Starr Ring, Cloud’s Rest, and Cathedral Peak do not come under this general law because their contours were determined by the ice which flowed about and above them, but even among these inter-basin heights we frequently find marked difference of steepness between their north and south sides, because many of the higher of these mountains and crests extending east and west, continued to shelter and nourish fragmentary glacierets long after the death of the main trunk to which they belonged. “In ascending any of the principal streams of this region, lakes in all stages of decay are found in great abundance, gradually becoming younger until we reach the almost countless gems of the summits with basins bright as their crystal waters. Upon the Nevada and its branches, there are not fewer than a hundred of these lakes, from a mile to a hundred yards in diameter, with countless glistening pondlets about the size of moons. Both the Yosemite and the Hetch-Hetchy valleys are lake basins filled with sand and the matter of morains easily and rapidly supplied by their swift descending rivers from upper morains. The mountains above Yosemite have scarce been touched by any other denudation but that of ice. Perhaps all of the post glacial denudation of every kind would not average an inch in depth for the whole region.