The third day the gale was over, and though still cold, the weather was beautifully bright and clear. On setting out on my expedition to the summit of the mountain, I had first to climb up the railway, which went as far as the top of the ridge, where the quartz cropped out in large masses. From this there was a gradual ascent to the summit, about four miles distant, over ground which was stony, like a newly macadamized road, and covered with wiry brushwood waist-high. This was rendered a still more pleasant place to travel over by being infested by grizzly bears, whose tracks I could see on every spot of ground capable of receiving the impression of their feet. At last I arrived at the foot of the immense masses of rock which formed the summit of the mountain, and the only means of continuing the ascent was by climbing up long slides of loose sharp-cornered stones of all sizes. Every step I took forward, I went about half a step backward, the stones giving way under my feet, and causing a general commotion from top to bottom. On reaching the top of this place, after suffering a good deal in my shins and shoe-leather, I found myself on a ledge of rock, with a similar one forty or fifty feet above me, to be gained by climbing another slide of loose stones; and having spent about an hour in working my passage up a succession of places of this sort, I arrived at the foot of the immense wall of solid rock which crowned the summit of the mountain. To reach the lowest point of the top of the perpendicular wall above me, I had some fifteen or twenty feet to climb the best way I could, and the prospect of any failure in the attempt was by no means encouraging, as, had I happened to fall, I should have been carried down to the regions below with an avalanche of loose rocks and stones. Even as I stood studying how I should make the ascent by means of the projecting ledges, and tracking out my course before I made the attempt, I felt the stones beginning to give way under my feet; and seeing there was no time to lose, I went at it, and after a pretty hard struggle I reached the top. This, however, was not the summit--I was only between the teeth of the saw; but I was enabled to gain the top of one of the peaks by means of a ledge, about a foot and a half wide, which slanted up the face of the rock. Here I sat down to enjoy the view, and certainly I felt amply repaid for all the labor of the ascent, by the vastness and grandeur of the panorama around me. I looked back for more than a hundred miles over the mountainous pine-clad region of the “Mines,” where, from the shapes of some of the mountains, I could distinguish many places which I had visited. Beyond this lay the wide plains of the Sacramento Valley, in which the course of the rivers could be traced by the trees which grew along their banks; and beyond the plains the coast range was distinctly seen.