It looks a fearsome place to halt! but it is beauty, and not fear, that cries it. Scarce four feet wide is the trail, solid granite, piled high on our right in fragments from the mountain side, and sloping immediately below us, as if ready to fall lower at any moment. The sunlight throws the shadows of our horses as black as those thrown on the desert floor by the fierce Arabian sun, and burnishes the opposite Yosemite cliffs with a light that positively glitters on their crystalline fronts. Beneath us, like a lawn, and looking as smooth and flat as an artificial garden, lies the mirror of the Merced River, and directly opposite to us (some mile and a half away) stands in one gash, from topmost lip to final foot, the Yosemite Falls. No wonder the impulse to stop at this point was mutual, for here, for the first time, the falls, as a whole, can be seen at one glance. […]
From: Charles Quincy Turner, Yosemite Valley Through the Stereoscope, Underwood & Underwood, New York, 1902, p. 45.
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