Identifier: threewonderlands00murp (find matches)
Title: Three wonderlands of the American West; being the notes of a traveler, concerning the Yellowstone park, the Yosemite national park, and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, with a chapter on other wonders of the great American West
Year: 1912 (1910s)
Authors: Murphy, Thos. D. (Thomas Dowler), 1866-1928
Subjects:
Publisher: Boston, L. C. Page & company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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beauty such as lurksIn some wild poet when he works Without a conscience or an aim.In color, in contour, in beauty, in grandeur,in all that goes to make a natural landscapeenchanting and impressive, Yosemite surelyexcels. It is easy of access now, since the advent ofthe railway up the )\Ierced River Canyon to ElPortal, not very far from the ofiicial entranceof the Park. One may take a Pullman car atSan Francisco or Los Angeles at midnight andat daybreak find himself gliding along the banksof the river in the mountain pass that leads tothe valley. El Portal station is reached quiteearly in the morning. Here a new hotel,located well up the mountainside, affords oppor-tunity for breakfast and it is also the startingpoint for the coaches that take you into thevalley. \ery diffierent indeed from the situa-tion four or five years ago, when a coach ride ofseventy-five miles was necessary to reach thepoint where the train now stops. At that timeperhaps quite as many came to Yosemite by the 60
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THE YOSEMITE way of Raymond on the south, visiting thegreat trees enroute, as from Merced, but ineither case the distance by coach was about thesame, and while every mile of the road is repletewith interest and beauty, not a few people weredeterred by the one hundred and fifty miles ofcoaching over mountain roads. To this wasadded the round of the valley by coach and trail,forty miles or more, depending upon how thor-oughly the tourist might wish to explore thePark. And the Yosemite roads are not to becompared with those of the Yellowstone. Infact, they average little better than mountaintrails, usually too narrow for vehicles to passeach other, very steep in places, distressinglystony and rough, and in dry weather coveredseveral inches deep with an impalpable whitedust that rolls in suffocating clouds from thewheels. If one is content to visit YosemiteVrJley only, he can now do so and drive no morethan twenty-five to fifty miles by coach, supple-mented, of course, by mule-back trail

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