It appears, therefore, that Hetch Hetchy Valley, far from being a plain,
common, rock-bound meadow, as many who have not seen it seem to suppose,
is a grand landscape garden, one of Nature's rarest and most precious
mountain temples. As in Yosemite, the sublime rocks of its walls seem
to glow with life, whether leaning back in repose or standing erect in
thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, their
brows in the sky, their feet set in the groves and gay flowery meadows,
while birds, bees, and butterflies help the river and waterfalls to
stir all the air into music--things frail and fleeting and types of
permanence meeting here and blending, just as they do in Yosemite, to
draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her.
Sad to say, this most precious and sublime feature of the Yosemite
National Park, one of the greatest of all our natural resources for the
uplifting joy and peace and health of the people, is in danger of being
dammed and made into a reservoir to help supply San Francisco with water
and light, thus flooding it from wall to wall and burying its gardens
and groves one or two hundred feet deep. This grossly destructive
commercial scheme has long been planned and urged (though water as pure
and abundant can be got from outside of the people's park, in a dozen
different places), because of the comparative cheapness of the dam and
of the territory which it is sought to divert from the great uses to
which it was dedicated in the Act of 1890 establishing the Yosemite
National Park.
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