The Sierra Nevada

The Sierra Nevada is a single great mountain range running about 400 miles down the eastern side of California, a tilted block of granite that rises gently from the Central Valley on the west and drops in a sheer wall to the desert on the east. It holds the highest summit in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney at 14,505 feet (4,421 m), along with the deep glacier-carved valleys of Yosemite and the giant sequoia groves, the largest trees on Earth.

Glaciers sculpted the high country into a landscape of polished granite domes, alpine lakes, and U-shaped valleys, while the range's height wrings the moisture from Pacific storms — its deep snowpack is the single most important water source for California. The abrupt eastern escarpment, plunging toward the Owens Valley and the Great Basin desert, is one of the most dramatic mountain fronts in North America. John Muir called it the "Range of Light."