The Sierra Nevada
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Right now this is just a working file to help me gather my photos together from various PhotoCDs.
Eastward, beyond the surf of the Pacific, beyond the tawny rolling Coast Range and the wide central valley of California, rises the great wall of the Sierra Nevada. Four hundred miles long, seventy-five miles wide, ten to more than fourteen thousand feet in height, it ranks with the major mountain ranges of the world. Certainly it is one of the most beautiful. Geologically, it is a titled block of the earth's crust -- a long, continuous slope fronting the west, and a short, breath-taking decline to the eastern deserts.
Truly the "Range of Light," as John Muir defined it, the Sierra Nevada rises to the sun as a vast shining world of stone and snow and foaming waters, mellowed by the forests growing upon it and the clouds and storms that flow over it.
-- Ansel Adams, 1938, in the foreword to Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (quoted in the Sierra chapter of his autobiography )
Mark Twain wrote the definitive treatise on Lake Tahoe in Roughing It .
Mostly drained to support California agriculture...
The nightlife here isn't what it used to be. In its heyday Bodie had 10,000 residents and a murder every day. Bodie is 8400' up into the the White Mountains and is now a California state park.
In the White Mountains, just east of the Sierra. Some of these trees are 4,000 years old. They are the oldest living things on earth.
Here's the Devil's Postpile granite formation:
In the Eastern Sierra.
These parks include Mt. Whitney (14,495', highest peak in the Lower 48) and catch all the rain so that it doesn't fall on the dry Eastern Sierra. The Giant Sequoia can live up to 3,200 years and typically grow to a height of over 200 feet. They are the largest living things on earth.
