Sierra Journal, Summer of 1869, v. 2, 1869 [ca. 1887], Image 53

100 crisp electric spark for joy enlivening [breaking through] the massy sublimity of the mountains like the merry laugh of a child Thank You Thank you all three for your [lively] quickening company. Heaven [bless & keep you all] bless you, guide every wing & leg, Goodnight [my] friends three Goodnight. Goodnight [goodnight] July 22 (place first the deer, 2d the broken tree, 3 the clouds) ¶ [A] Grand white cloud mountains & [domes & domes] created about noon as usual. [creation today pearly dome white mountains of massive architecture peaks & crags [caves] & jags domes were uppiled in[to] vast ridges & ranges of endless variety of mountain peaks sculptured & adorned with never ending variety of form] as if nature dearly loved this sort of work doing [at] it again & again nearly every day with infinite industry [pains-taking] & producing beauty that never palls. A few long zigzags of lightning [and] a five minutes shower then a gradual wilting [of cloudland] & clearing into [pure] ether. ¶ Have been sketching a silver fir that stands on a granite ridge a few hundred 101 yards to the eastward of camp. A fine tree with a particular snowstorm story to tell. It is about a hundred feet height growing on bare rock [gray granite] thrusting its roots into a weathered joint less than an inch wide & bulging out to form a base [foot] to hear its weight. [no soil at all of the ordinary kind, only a few weathered chips, sunshine & snow its main dependence. The/its story is of a great one about a swath the storm [that] came from the north while it was young & broke it down [& buried it in heavy snow & held it down so long [cut out] …dles so hard that it kil…the ground as is shown…ad weather beaten top le…the [new] living trunk… [jured] up from a new shoot below the break (p 99) [were]…trunk & count the rings that have overgrown the dead sapling tell the year of the storm [would then be told. On the north side of the trunk close to the ground there is a very dense growth of closely packed branches the flatgrounds being packed on top of each other as if they had been gathered from another tree & stored here. This abnormal growth is evidently connected with the same]https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmn-sj2/1052/thumbnail.jp