Down the trail to Barnard's again, and up the opposite side of the valley to the foot of the Upper Yosemite Falls. Here a small stream plunges over the edge of the rocks and falls directly down over sixteen hundred feet, ten times as high as Niagara; before the water reaches the bottom the wind has reduced it to little less than spray, and just before I got to the foot of the cliff the wind suddenly changed and I was drenched to my skin before I could get away. These falls produce a peculiar sound down in the valley that is not heard at all near them. It is that of falling rocks or suppressed thunder, caused probably by the water being blown against the face of the precipice. Whether it was the small volume of water compared with the Nevada Falls, or having my ardor so suddenly dampened by the shower bath, but the Yosemite Falls did not impress me as the other falls I had seen did. On the way back, a gentleman just ahead of me suddenly came upon a rattlesnake a yard long, and the man jumped into the air, and ran back like a deer, but his courage returning he struck the snake a well-directed blow with a stone, and now has the four rattles in his pocket as a trophy.
On the way out of the valley, in the afternoon, I stopped at the Bridal Veil Falls, which are nine hundred feet high. Here I met a lady painting near the falls. Two days before that I first saw her at the Nevada Falls, where, before night, she had put upon canvas a most striking picture of the falls. Now she was doing the same here, and we sat upon the rocks at the foot of the falls and had a most delightful talk, for nearly an hour, on the advantages we had (she traveled horseback) over common tourists who depend upon cars and stages.
Like the Yosemite, these falls reach the bottom all blown to spray, and I began to perceive that after three days of this tremendous sight-seeing such common heights as one or two thousand feet were passed by unnoticed, and it took some such prominent figure as El Capitan to awaken any special interest. This solid, smooth, perpendicular piece of granite juts out boldly into the valley over three thousand feet high, and it easily holds first place in point of interest at the south end of the valley, as the Half Dome does at the north end.