Foto

"One shining morning, at the head of the Pacheco Pass, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still sppears as the most divinely beautiful and sublime I have ever beheld. There at my feet lay the great plain of California, level as a lake thirty or forty miles wide, four hundred long, one rich furred bed of golden Compositae. And along the eastern shore of this lake of gold rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, in massive, tranquil grandeur, so gloriously colored and so radiant that it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top, and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-gray belt of snow; then a blue and dark purple, marking the extension of forests; and stretching along the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple, where lay the miners' gold and the open foothill gardens - all the colors smoothly blending, making a wall of light clear as crystal and ineffably fine, yet firm as adamant. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light."
--- JOHN MUIR, 1890

This golden yellow view of the Range of Light, is on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, along Bishop Creek Road.