Yosemite Falls in Storm from Sentinal Dome, Yosemite National Park, California
© 2005 Jerry Dodrill

"From the far summit of a wall of pearly granite, over stains of purple and yellow –leaping, as it were, from the very cloud– falls a silver scarf, light, lace-like, graceful, luminous, swayed by the wind.

The cliffs' repose is undisturbed by the silvery fall whose endlessly varying forms of wind-tossed spray lend an element of life to what would otherwise be masses of inanimate stone. The Yosemite is a grace. It is an adornment. It is a ray of light on the solid front of the precipice"

-Clarence King, from Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, 1872.

King conducted the government's geological survey of the fortieth parallel (1867-1872) and was the first director of the US Geological survey.