Snow. Everywhere. As far as the eye could reach-fifty miles, looking southward from the highest white peak, -filling ravines and gulches, and dropping from the walls of canons in white shroud-like drifts, fashioning the dividing ridge into the likeness of a monstrous grave, hiding the bases of giant pines, and completely covering young trees and larches, rimming with porcelain the bowl-like edges of still, cold lakes, and undulating in motionless white billows to the edge of the distant horizon. Snow lying everywhere over the California Sierras on the 15th day of March 1848, and still falling."