Turning around to face North, the view is also pretty awesome. This is a text-book example of a glacial valley with its rounded form. Imagine thousands of feet of ice filling this valley to the top and beyond. The granite itself was structurally altered by the force of those millions of tons bearing down over the millenia, causing some to become heavily fractured while other examples became deeply consolidated, later spalling in curved sheets, forming the characteristic domes of the Sierras.

They don't make a polarizer for my little camera, so I tried to get the same effect by holding my sunglasses over the lens. If you think this picture looks sort of brownish, you should have seen it before I tuned it up on the computer! I think it improves the sense of depth, and the color cast is sort of antiquey-looking... yeah...