Few tourists or travellers of leisure will fail to pay a flying visit to the grand and beautiful lakes and tarns lying among the eternal snows of the Sierra Nevada mountains, which separate the Silver from the Golden State, and are crossed by the Pacific Railway at an elevation of 7,042 feet above the sea level. From the Summit and Truckee stations there are all necessary facilities for reaching Donner, Tahoe, and other lakes, and for a stay among some of the grandest scenery in the world. The space occupied by this chapter would not describe in the barest details the grand mountain peaks, in one case rising to an altitude of 14,500 feet; the forests of magnificent trees; the quieter valleys “in verdure clad;” the waterfalls and cataracts and torrents of this Alpine region, which is within half a day’s journey of San Francisco, and but three or four hours from districts which for eight months of the year have the temperature of Southern Italy. Sufficiently good coaches convey you to leading points, where there are comfortable inns, or, in the summer months, travellers can do a little tent‐life and open‐air camping with advantage, the climate among the mountains being pure, bracing, and yet warm. On the leading lakes there are boats to be had, and on one or two there are small steamers plying regularly. Fishing and hunting can be indulged in to the heart’s content. The Sierra mountain trout is unsurpassed anywhere; while the sportsman can bag anything from a Californian quail to a grizzly bear—the latter, more especially, _if he can_. At most of the ordinary places of resort he will get the morning papers of San Francisco the same day, while Truckee boasts of a journal of its own, published, be it observed, 7,000 feet up the mountains!(11)