The general view from the
summit is one of the most extensive and sublime to be found in all the
Range. To the eastward you gaze far out over the desert plains and
mountains of the "Great Basin," range beyond range extending with soft
outlines, blue and purple in the distance. More than six thousand feet
below you lies Lake Mono, ten miles in diameter from north to south, and
fourteen from west to east, lying bare in the treeless desert like a
disk of burnished metal, though at times it is swept by mountain storm
winds and streaked with foam. To the southward there is a well defined
range of pale-gray extinct volcanoes, and though the highest of them
rises nearly two thousand feet above the lake, you can look down from
here into their circular, cup-like craters, from which a comparatively
short time ago ashes and cinders were showered over the surrounding sage
plains and glacier-laden mountains.
To the westward the landscape is made up of exceedingly strong, gray,
glaciated domes and ridge waves, most of them comparatively low, but
the largest high enough to be called mountains; separated by canyons
and darkened with lines and fields of forest, Cathedral Peak and Mount
Hoffman in the distance; small lakes and innumerable meadows in the
foreground.
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