Meadow in the Sky: A History of Yosemite's Tuolumne Meadows Region - Softcover

Stone O'Neill, Elizabeth

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9780914330677: Meadow in the Sky: A History of Yosemite's Tuolumne Meadows Region

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0914330675 ISBN 13: 9780914330677

Publisher: Albicaulis Pr, 1984

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Book by Stone O'Neill, Elizabeth

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From the Author:

I first came to know and love the mountains as a child in my family's cabin on the slopes of Mount Hood, Oregon.

I graduated from the University of the Pacific, where I later received a Master's degree in Interamerican Studies with a major in history. I taught elementary school in Stockton for many years.

Meanwhile, with my husband and children I backpacked and climbed extensively in the High Sierra, and hiked in the American and Canadian Rockies, the Cascades, and elsewhere. On sabbaticals and leaves we have lived a number of years in Europe and Mexico, hiking in the Alps, Pyrenees, and Norway. We are enthusiastic botanizers and bird watchers wherever we go.

I write travel and outdoor articles and poetry for various periodicals. This book is a tribute to my favorite mountain range and to the people whose lives it has touched.

Tuolumne Meadows lies 8,600 feet high in the sky of Yosemite, not far from the eastern entrance of the national park at Tioga Pass. Those who have seen it once come again and again.

There are other meadows in the Sierra, and all are entrancing, Crabtree and McClure, Colby and Evolution, Little Pete and Big Pete, to name only a few. But Tuolumne Meadows is the queen of the lot. Pete Starr, who wrote The Guide to the John Muir Trail and the High Sierra Region, which has been a bible to several generations of hikers, rightly called it "this most beautiful of all high Sierra meadows."

It's about twelve miles long including the Lyell Canyon, and in many places at least a half mile across. The mountains that rim it stand back so they can be seen: Ragged Peak, White Mountain, Dana, Gibbs, Mammoth Peak, Johnson Peak, the Unicorn (which really has three horns), the Cockscomb, Echo Crest and Echo Peaks, Cathedral Peak, Fairview Dome, Pothole Dome. Each has its own shape and character and, from the top, its special view.

Through the meadows flows a river whose two parents, the Lyell and Dana forks, bubble down from the bases of their respective mountains. The Dana Fork is limpid. When the Lyell Glacier is melting fast, the Lyell Fork is opalescent; when clear water predominates, as it does most of the time, it is wonderfully clear, pale, golden. They meet to form the Tuolumne, a stream of many moods.

It flows through the meadows and then tumbles downhill in a series of elegant cascades including Waterwheel Falls, grinds out the awesome mile-deep Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River, and dies as a wild river behind the prison walls of O'Shaughnessy Dam.

Lower down it carves another canyon through the foothills, and is again impounded, this time in the Don Pedro Reservoir. Now almost at sea level, it falls upon evil days in the Central Valley, where it is bled for irrigation and sullied with pollution. Finally, what is left meets the San Joaquin and flows out the Golden Gate into the sea.

But our business is with its youth, and with its home territory, Tuolumne Meadows.

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