One of these, the Hetch Hetchy Valley, is in the Yosemite
National Park about twenty miles from Yosemite and is easily accessible
to all sorts of travelers by a road and trail that leaves the Big Oak
Flat road at Bronson Meadows a few miles below Crane Flat, and to
mountaineers by way of Yosemite Creek basin and the head of the middle
fork of the Tuolumne.
It is said to have been discovered by Joseph Screech, a hunter, in 1850,
a year before the discovery of the great Yosemite. After my first visit
to it in the autumn of 1871, I have always called it the "Tuolumne
Yosemite," for it is a wonderfully exact counterpart of the Merced
Yosemite, not only in its sublime rocks and waterfalls but in the
gardens, groves and meadows of its flowery park-like floor. The floor of
Yosemite is about 4000 feet above the sea; the Hetch Hetchy floor about
3700 feet. And as the Merced River flows through Yosemite, so does the
Tuolumne through Hetch Hetchy. The walls of both are of gray granite,
rise abruptly from the floor, are sculptured in the same style and in
both every rock is a glacier monument.
Standing boldly out from the south wall is a strikingly picturesque rock
called by the Indians, Kolana, the outermost of a group 2300 feet high,
corresponding with the Cathedral Rocks of Yosemite both in relative
position and form.
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