Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/241

Rh, and several settlers who have long called the Valley their home.

Snow sports in winter, dancing, camp-fire festivities, fishing and climbing in the summer are the Valley's amusements. On Independence Day the soldiers celebrate with games and fireworks, their audience being made up of travellers, ranchmen, and curious Digueños with their squaws and papooses.

The tourist season opens in April, when the Yosemite still wears winter dress. In May the snow has passed and the floods begin their resonant sagas. Trees and ice cones are carried away from perilous ledges as the waters roar in terrifying volume over the brinks of parapets and rush to meet the plethoric river. The wind and reflected colours in the rock make a floating rainbow ribbon of the long cascade of the Yosemite ; the craunch of the upper fall against beaten-out shelves of granite registers its vibrations far down in the Valley.

All the cataracts are most effective in May and June. By August the exuberant streams of spring slacken their pace, slip more indolently over the lip of the lordly cliffs, waft with tenuous grace to the wrack of talus below. Early in the season the revel of the wild flowers is at its height, the leaves and mosses are at their greenest, the