The first time I looked from Glacier Point, I was at a loss for words. And still, no words have come to me, and never will they come, to plumb the depth and span the breadth of wonder at that moment, just as no mere photograph will ever do a bit of justice to the view. But even half the distance to that mark will be twice as much the sense of any vista I have ever seen. And so I write.
First, the sky was of a blue as pure as any Persian turquoise mined from Arizona’s Sleeping Beauty. So accordingly, the air was clear as mountain water, and in the eastern distance, Sierra rock-bound peaks as far as you can see, their hard quartz monzonitic granite manifesting almost silver in the early afternoon mid-summer sun.
So this, my introduction to the famed Yosemite, well matched the myth. But Half Dome was a revelation. Something in its presence kept on pulling at my vision. I could not look away. Its sheer cliff face rising almost one full mile above the valley floor below is ground enough to stare. But that’s not nearly half the reason that in time it seemed the shaman to me, wizard of the bedrock world.
And the grand enchantment it then worked on me is something that has fused my consciousness to its still to this day.
~Son Rivers 2008
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