Mt. Sill 14,162'
Looking eastward from the summit of Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow Compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.... Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.
John Muir, The Mountains of California
From Elinore Lake to the NE, this is how Mt. Sill appears with normal
daylight.
A half hour after the Alpenglow photo of Mt Sill was taken the sky
clouded up and the rain soon began. From the bivybag campsite this photo shows
Mt. Jepson 13,390' center and Mt Sill to the right. Wisely I started a retreat
back to the South Fork Big Pine Creek trailhead and it was still storming in the
Palisades as I drove away.