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Show 568 however, of all the noble landscape as seen from here seems more wonderful than the Cathedral itself, a temple displaying Nature's best masonry and sermons in stone." It is true. Of all the peaks surrounding Tuolumne, Cathedral peak is prime. One sits on the summit and feels not so much above the landscape as truly in it. I have been there perhaps twenty times, once on the centennial of Muir's ascent, when the clouds sailed through the mountains, riding the west wind. Each day I remember on Cathedral Peak seems sacred. The world seems to flow about that granite altar in all its wholeness. Yet Muir was not sure that sitting on the summit consummated his experience in the Sierra. He wrote to his brother Daniel several weeks after his ascent. He said that when he sat on Cathedral Peak, he was hungry when he looked up, and ate his bread. But when he looked down he felt full. He wondered what that meant. Perhaps that he was satisfied with the spiritual bread of the Sierra, and yet longed for something more. (when you get to the top of the mountain, keep on climbing!) Cathedral Peak had become young Muir's church. "In our best times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars." On this mountain altar he is offered a promise, not a fulfillment. Part of the promise is fulfilled when he discovers while descending that cassiope grows upon his sacred mountain. Cassiope, or white heather, "the highest name of all the small mountain heath people." In some ways, his meeting with |