Most, however, are quite small, averaging perhaps but little more than three fourths of a mile in length.
One of the very finest of the thousands I have enjoyed lies hidden in an extensive forest of the Two-leaved Pine, on the edge of the basin of the ancient Tuolumne Mer de Glace, about eight miles to the west of Mount Dana.
Imagine yourself at the Tuolumne Soda Springs on the bank of the river, a day's journey above Yosemite Valley.

You set off northward through a forest that stretches away indefinitely before you, seemingly unbroken by openings of any kind.

As soon as you are fairly into the woods, the gray mountain-peaks, with their snowy gorges and hollows, are lost to view.

The ground is littered with fallen trunks that lie crossed and recrossed like storm-lodged wheat; and besides this close forest of pines, the rich moraine soil supports a luxuriant growth of ribbon-leaved grasses--bromus, triticum, calamagrostis, agrostis, etc., which rear their handsome spikes and panicles above your waist.

Making your way through the fertile wilderness,--finding lively bits of interest now and then in the squirrels and Clark crows, and perchance in a deer or bear,--after the lapse of an hour or two vertical bars of sunshine are seen ahead between the brown shafts of the pines, showing that you are approaching an open space, and then you suddenly emerge from the forest shadows upon a delightful purple lawn lying smooth and free in the light like a lake.