The Yosemite National Park contains about 1500 square miles. Hetch-Hetchy Valley is separated from the Yosemite Valley by a mountain range having a mean elevation of over 8500 feet, and distant from that valley about thirty-five miles by mountain trail. The floor of the valley is between 3000 and 4000 feet in altitude, is level and grass covered, and two or three miles long and nearly half a mile wide. It is surrounded by steep cliffs, out of which extend deep gorges. Just back of Hetch-Hetchy is a gorge a mile deep and one and a half miles wide. The sides of the valley are granite and very steep and precipitous, rising to a height of between 2000 and 5000 feet in different places. The valley is divided into two parts by a large ridge of rocks extending nearly across the middle. The upper end of it is a high, dry area, covered with tall pine trees, varying between 200 and 300 feet high, and with live oak and other kinds of trees, thus forming a natural park. The grasses, shrubs, flowers and trees are beautiful. Several distinguished naturalists have pronounced the natural growth as very unusual. There are a greater variety of trees and larger oaks in the Hetch-Hetchy Valley than in the Yosemite. The area tributary to Hetch-Hetchy is very rough. Edmund A. Whitman, a lawyer of Boston and president of the Society for the Protection of National Parks; who has several times visited Hetch-Hetchy, in his testimony before the House Committee on the Public Lands last summer, stated: “I cannot attempt to describe to you the character of the country. It is some of the roughest God ever made. You do not find little places here and there with grass and water, but the largest part of the country is the roughest sort, where camping is as impossible as it would be on the top of this table. Camping and the use of the park reduces itself to one thing—the feed of horses. There are only three places in the entire park where you can take care of horses.” Hetch-Hetchy Valley is difficult of access. Because of the high, rough country surrounding it but few people visit it. Thus while 6000 or 7000 people visit the Yosemite Valley each year, less than 300 visit Hetch-Hetchy Valley. The valley, difficult to reach in summer, is rendered almost inaccessible as soon as the early snows begin to fall, and in winter is enshrouded in four or five feet of snow. The summer season in that high altitude is short, and rendered shorter than the ordinary in Hetch-Hetchy by the cooling effect of the mountain streams, almost icy cold, and by the surrounding mountain peaks, snow-capped except for a small part of the year. [Illustration: MAP SHOWING PROPOSED TUOLUMNE WATER SYSTEM] [Illustration: The Upper Hetch-Hetchy Valley The American City.]