The word valley hardly describes it, for the sides are perpendicular and almost a mile high, and this immense chasm is ten miles long and hardly a mile wide. The roar of the Merced River, so many thousand feet almost perpendicularly below, is heard even before one gets a glimpse of the river itself or even the valley, and my first thought was, is there any bottom to this chasm. On the opposite side of the valley I recognized Bridal Veil Fall from the many views I had seen of it, and a little farther down the road, which runs dangerously near the edge of precipices four and five hundred feet high, El Capitan came suddenly into sight, the most prominent object to be seen in the whole valley from that point of view. It was quite dark when I reached the hotel, which is half way up the valley, and the next morning my feet were too tired to think of much hill climbing, so I walked up the valley about a mile where it seems to separate into two branches, and taking the right hand one, climbed up a rocky trail to the Vernal Falls. Here the Merced, a comparatively small stream, falls straight down three hundred and fifty feet, sending mist and spray up the sides of the rocks in all directions, making a roar that can be heard long before one gets in sight of the falls. "You can't follow that trail up by the falls; we got wet through trying it," said a couple of tourists whom I met just below the falls, and they started off on another trail two miles farther around. But I took the shorter route, up over slippery shelving rocks that would let one slide quickly down into the pool where the waters came thundering down from a height of perhaps thirty feet, and before I got through the shower of mist and spray, up to the ladders that lead to the top of the falls, I was wet through, too. Lying on the rocks, the warm sun soon dried my clothes, and after a good meal at Snow's, a small hotel situated midway between the Vernal and Nevada Falls, I climbed up to the top of the Nevada Falls. Here the water comes rushing down over high rocks, goes through a narrow gorge under the bridge with a roar, and plunges over the cliff. Down a short distance, the water strikes a projecting rock, and the whole river is sent out with a twist into the air, one mass of white foam that spreads out into hundreds of little white rockets that never explode, but fade away into thin spray. Down farther, another projecting rock tears the water to pieces again and sends it shooting out into the air, till, when it reaches the bottom and has fallen a distance of fully seven hundred feet, there is scarcely anything left of the water but foam.