the john muir exhibit - writings - the_yosemite - chapter 6
The Yosemite
Chapter 6
The Forest Trees in General
For the use of the ever-increasing number of Yosemite visitors who make
extensive excursions into the mountains beyond the Valley, a sketch of
the forest trees in general will probably be found useful. The different
species are arranged in zones and sections, which brings the forest as
a whole within the comprehension of every observer. These species are
always found as controlled by the climates of different elevations,
by soil and by the comparative strength of each species in taking and
holding possession of the ground; and so appreciable are these relations
the traveler need never be at a loss in determining within a few
hundred feet his elevation above sea level by the trees alone; for,
notwithstanding some of the species range upward for several thousand
feet and all pass one another more or less, yet even those species
possessing the greatest vertical range are available in measuring
the elevation; inasmuch as they take on new forms corresponding with
variations in altitude. Entering the lower fringe of the forest composed
of Douglas oaks and Sabine pines, the trees grow so far apart that not
one-twentieth of the surface of the ground is in shade at noon. After
advancing fifteen or twenty miles towards Yosemite and making an ascent
of from two to three thousand feet you reach the lower margin of the
main pine belt, composed of great sugar pine, yellow pine, incense cedar
and sequoia. Next you come to the magnificent silver-fir belt and lastly
to the upper pine belt, which sweep up to the feet of the summit peaks
in a dwarfed fringe, to a height of from ten to twelve thousand feet.
That this general order of distribution depends on climate as affected
by height above the sea, is seen at once, but there are other harmonies
that become manifest only after observation and study. One of the most
interesting of these is the arrangement of the forest in long curving
bands, braided together into lace-like patterns in some places and
out-spread in charming variety. The key to these striking arrangements
is the system of ancient glaciers; where they flowed the trees followed,
tracing their courses along the sides of cañons, over ridges, and high
plateaus. The cedar of Lebanon, said Sir Joseph Hooker, occurs upon one
of the moraines of an ancient glacier. All the forests of the Sierra are
growing upon moraines, but moraines vanish like the glaciers that make
them. Every storm that falls upon them wastes them, carrying away their
decaying, disintegrating material into new formations, until they are no
longer recognizable without tracing their transitional forms down the
Range from those still in process of formation in some places through
those that are more and more ancient and more obscured by vegetation and
all kinds of post-glacial weathering. It appears, therefore, that the
Sierra forests indicate the extent and positions of ancient moraines as
well as they do belts of climate.
One will have no difficulty in knowing the Nut Pine (Pinus Sabiniana),
for it is the first conifer met in ascending the Range from the west,
springing up here and there among Douglas oaks and thickets of ceanothus
and manzanita; its extreme upper limit being about 4000 feet above the
sea, its lower about from 500 to 800 feet. It is remarkable for its
loose, airy, wide-branching habit and thin gray foliage. Full-grown
specimens are from forty to fifty feet in height and from two to three
feet in diameter. The trunk usually divides into three or four main
branches about fifteen or twenty feet from the ground that, after
bearing away from one another, shoot straight up and form separate
summits. Their slender, grayish needles are from eight to twelve inches
long, and inclined to droop, contrasting with the rigid, dark-colored
trunk and branches. No other tree of my acquaintance so substantial in
its body has foliage so thin and pervious to the light. The cones are
from five to eight inches long and about as large in thickness; rich
chocolate-brown in color and protected by strong, down-curving nooks
which terminate the scales. Nevertheless the little Douglas Squirrel can
open them. Indians climb the trees like bears and beat off the cones or
recklessly cut off the more fruitful branches with hatchets, while the
squaws gather and roast them until the scales open sufficiently to
allow the hard-shell seeds to be beaten out. The curious little Pinus
attenuata is found at an elevation of from 1500 to 3000 feet, growing in
close groves and belts. It is exceedingly slender and graceful, although
trees that chance to stand alone send out very long, curved branches,
making a striking contrast to the ordinary grove form. The foliage is of
the same peculiar gray-green color as that of the nut pine, and is worn
about as loosely, so that the body of the tree is scarcely obscured
by it. At the age of seven or eight years it begins to bear cones in
whorls on the main axis, and as they never fall off, the trunk is soon
picturesquely dotted with them. Branches also soon become fruitful. The
average size of the tree is about thirty or forty feet in height and
twelve to fourteen inches in diameter. The cones are about four inches
long and covered with a sort of varnish and gum, rendering them
impervious to moisture.
No observer can fail to notice the admirable adaptation of this curious
pine to the fire-swept regions where alone it is found. After a running
fire has scorched and killed it the cones open and the ground beneath it
is then sown broadcast with all the seeds ripened during its whole life.
Then up spring a crowd of bright, hopeful seedlings, giving beauty for
ashes in lavish abundance.
The Sugar Pine, King Of Pine Trees
Of all the world's eighty or ninety species of pine trees, the Sugar
Pine (Pinus Lambertiana) is king, surpassing all others, not merely in
size but in lordly beauty and majesty. In the Yosemite region it grows
at an elevation of from 3000 to 7000 feet above the sea and attains
most perfect development at a height of about 5000 feet. The largest
specimens are commonly about 220 feet high and from six to eight feet
in diameter four feet from the ground, though some grand old patriarch
may be met here and there that has enjoyed six or eight centuries of
storms and attained a thickness of ten or even twelve feet, still sweet
and fresh in every fiber. The trunk is a remarkably smooth, round,
delicately-tapered shaft, straight and regular as if turned in a lathe,
mostly without limbs, purplish brown in color and usually enlivened with
tufts of a yellow lichen. Toward the head of this magnificent column
long branches sweep gracefully outward and downward, sometimes forming
a palm-like crown, but far more impressive than any palm crown I ever
beheld. The needles are about three inches long in fascicles of five,
and arranged in rather close tassels at the ends of slender branchlets
that clothe the long outsweeping limbs. How well they sing in the wind,
and how strikingly harmonious an effect is made by the long cylindrical
cones, depending loosely from the ends of the long branches! The cones
are about fifteen to eighteen inches long, and three in diameter;
green, shaded with dark purple on their sunward sides. They are ripe in
September and October of the second year from the flower. Then the flat,
thin scales open and the seeds take wing, but the empty cones become
still more beautiful and effective as decorations, for their diameter is
nearly doubled by the spreading of the scales, and their color changes
to yellowish brown while they remain, swinging on the tree all the
following winter and summer, and continue effectively beautiful even on
the ground many years after they fall. The wood is deliciously fragrant,
fine in grain and texture and creamy yellow, as if formed of condensed
sunbeams. The sugar from which the common name is derived is, I think,
the best of sweets. It exudes from the heart-wood where wounds have been
made by forest fires or the ax, and forms irregular, crisp, candy-like
kernels of considerable size, something like clusters of resin beads.
When fresh it is white, but because most of the wounds on which it is
found have been made by fire the sap is stained and the hardened sugar
becomes brown. Indians are fond of it, but on account of its laxative
properties only small quantities may be eaten. No tree lover will ever
forget his first meeting with the sugar pine. In most pine trees there
is the sameness of expression which to most people is apt to become
monotonous, for the typical spiral form of conifers, however beautiful,
affords little scope for appreciable individual character. The sugar
pine is as free from conventionalities as the most picturesque oaks. No
two are alike, and though they toss out their immense arms in what might
seem extravagant gestures they never lose their expression of serene
majesty. They are the priests of pines and seem ever to be addressing
the surrounding forest. The yellow pine is found growing with them on
warm hillsides, and the silver fir on cool northern slopes but, noble
as these are, the sugar pine is easily king, and spreads his arms above
them in blessing while they rock and wave in sign of recognition. The
main branches are sometimes forty feet long, yet persistently simple,
seldom dividing at all, excepting near the end; but anything like a
bare cable appearance is prevented by the small, tasseled branchlets
that extend all around them; and when these superb limbs sweep out
symmetrically on all sides, a crown sixty or seventy feet wide is
formed, which, gracefully poised on the summit of the noble shaft, is
a glorious object. Commonly, however, there is a preponderance of
limbs toward the east, away from the direction of the prevailing winds.
Although so unconventional when full-grown, the sugar pine is a
remarkably proper tree in youth--a strict follower of coniferous
fashions--slim, erect, with leafy branches kept exactly in place, each
tapering in outline and terminating in a spiry point. The successive
forms between the cautious neatness of youth and the bold freedom of
maturity offer a delightful study. At the age of fifty or sixty years,
the shy, fashionable form begins to be broken up. Specialized branches
push out and bend with the great cones, giving individual character,
that becomes more marked from year to year. Its most constant companion
is the yellow pine. The Douglas spruce, libocedrus, sequoia, and the
silver fir are also more or less associated with it; but on many
deep-soiled mountain-sides, at an elevation of about 5000 feet above the
sea, it forms the bulk of the forest, filling every swell and hollow and
down-plunging ravine. The majestic crowns, approaching each other in
bold curves, make a glorious canopy through which the tempered sunbeams
pour, silvering the needles, and gilding the massive boles and the
flowery, park-like ground into a scene of enchantment. On the most sunny
slopes the white-flowered, fragrant chamaebatia is spread like a carpet,
brightened during early summer with the crimson sarcodes, the wild rose,
and innumerable violets and gilias. Not even in the shadiest nooks will
you find any rank, untidy weeds or unwholesome darkness. In the north
sides of ridges the boles are more slender, and the ground is mostly
occupied by an underbrush of hazel, ceanothus, and flowering dogwood,
but not so densely as to prevent the traveler from sauntering where he
will; while the crowning branches are never impenetrable to the rays of
the sun, and never so interblended as to lose their individuality.
The Yellow Or Silver Pine
The Silver Pine (Pinus ponderosa), or Yellow Pine, as it is commonly
called, ranks second among the pines of the Sierra as a lumber tree, and
almost rivals the sugar pine in stature and nobleness of port. Because
of its superior powers of enduring variations of climate and soil, it
has a more extensive range than any other conifer growing on the Sierra.
On the western slope it is first met at an elevation of about 2000 feet,
and extends nearly to the upper limit of the timber-line. Thence,
crossing the range by the lowest passes, it descends to the eastern
base, and pushes out for a considerable distance into the hot, volcanic
plains, growing bravely upon well-watered moraines, gravelly lake
basins, climbing old volcanoes and dropping ripe cones among ashes and
cinders.
The average size of full-grown trees on the western slope where it is
associated with the sugar pine, is a little less than 200 feet in height
and from five to six feet in diameter, though specimens considerably
larger may easily be found. Where there is plenty of free sunshine and
other conditions are favorable, it presents a striking contrast in form
to the sugar pine, being a symmetrical spire, formed of a straight round
trunk, clad with innumerable branches that are divided over and over
again. Unlike the Yosemite form about one-half of the trunk is commonly
branchless, but where it grows at all close three-fourths or more is
naked, presenting then a more slender and elegant shaft than any other
tree in the woods. The bark is mostly arranged in massive plates, some
of them measuring four or five feet in length by eighteen inches in
width, with a thickness of three or four inches, forming a quite
marked and distinguishing feature. The needles are of a fine, warm,
yellow-green color, six to eight inches long, firm and elastic, and
crowded in handsome, radiant tassels on the upturning ends of the
branches. The cones are about three or four inches long, and two and
a half wide, growing in close, sessile clusters among the leaves.
The species attains its noblest form in filled-up lake basins,
especially in those of the older yosemites, and as we have seen, so
prominent a part does it form of their groves that it may well be called
the Yosemite Pine.
The Jeffrey variety attains its finest development in the northern
portion of the Range, in the wide basins of the McCloud and Pitt Rivers,
where it forms magnificent forests scarcely invaded by any other tree.
It differs from the ordinary form in size, being only bout half as tall,
in its redder and more closely-furrowed bark grayish-green foliage, less
divided branches, and much larger cones; but intermediate forms come in
which make a clear separation impossible, although some botanists regard
it as a distinct species. It is this variety of ponderosa that climbs
storm-swept ridges alone, and wanders out among the volcanoes of the
Great Basin. Whether exposed to extremes of heat or cold, it is dwarfed
like many other trees, and becomes all knots and angles, wholly unlike
the majestic forms we have been sketching. Old specimens, bearing cones
about as big as pineapples, may sometimes be found clinging to rifted
rocks at an elevation of 7000 or 8000 feet, whose highest branches
scarce reach above one's shoulders.
I have often feasted on the beauty of these noble trees when they were
towering in all their winter grandeur, laden with snow--one mass of
bloom; in summer, too, when the brown, staminate clusters hang thick
among the shimmering needles, and the big purple burrs are ripening in
the mellow light; but it is during cloudless wind-storms that these
colossal pines are most impressively beautiful. Then they bow like
willows, their leaves streaming forward all in one direction, and, when
the sun shines upon them at the required angle, entire groves glow as if
every leaf were burnished silver. The fall of tropic light on the crown
of a palm is a truly glorious spectacle, the fervid sun-flood breaking
upon the glossy leaves in long lance-rays, like mountain water among
boulders at the foot of an enthusiastic cataract. But to me there is
something more impressive in the fall of light upon these noble, silver
pine pillars: it is beaten to the finest dust and shed off in myriads
of minute sparkles that seem to radiate from the very heart of the tree
as if like rain, falling upon fertile soil, it had been absorbed to
reappear in flowers of light. This species also gives forth the finest
wind music. After listening to it in all kinds of winds, night and
day, season after season, I think I could approximate to my position
on the mountain by this pine music alone. If you would catch the tone
of separate needles climb a tree in breezy weather. Every needle is
carefully tempered and gives forth no uncertain sound each standing out
with no interference excepting during head gales; then you may detect
the click of one needle upon another, readily distinguishable from the
free wind-like hum.
When a sugar pine and one of this species equal in size are observed
together, the latter is seen to be more simple in manners, more lively
and graceful, and its beauty is of a kind more easily appreciated; on
the other hand it is less dignified and original in demeanor. The yellow
pine seems ever eager to shoot aloft, higher and higher. Even while it
is drowsing in autumn sun-gold you may still detect a skyward
aspiration, but the sugar pine seems too unconsciously noble and too
complete in every way to leave room for even a heavenward care.
The Douglas Spruce
The Douglas Spruce (Pseudotsuga Douglasii) is one of the largest and
longest-lived of the giants that flourish throughout the main pine belt,
often attaining a height of nearly 200 feet, and a diameter of six or
seven feet. Where the growth is not too close, the stout, spreading
branches, covering more than half of the trunk, are hung with
innumerable slender, drooping sprays, handsomely feathered with the
short leaves which radiate at right angles all around them. This
vigorous tree is ever beautiful, welcoming the mountain winds and the
snow as well as the mellow summer light; and it maintains its youthful
freshness undiminished from century to century through a thousand
storms. It makes its finest appearance during the months of June and
July, when the brown buds at the ends of the sprays swell and open,
revealing the young leaves, which at first are bright yellow, making the
tree appear as if covered with gay blossoms; while the pendulous bracted
cones, three or four inches long, with their shell-like scales, are a
constant adornment.
The young trees usually are assembled in family groups, each sapling
exquisitely symmetrical. The primary branches are whorled regularly
around the axis, generally in fives, while each is draped with long,
feathery sprays that descend in lines as free and as finely drawn as
those of falling water.
In Oregon and Washington it forms immense forests, growing tall and
mast-like to a height of 300 feet, and is greatly prized as a lumber
tree. Here it is scattered among other trees, or forms small groves,
seldom ascending higher than 5500 feet, and never making what would be
called a forest. It is not particular in its choice of soil: wet or dry,
smooth or rocky, it makes out to live well on them all. Two of the
largest specimens, as we have seen, are in Yosemite; one of these, more
than eight feet in diameter, is growing on a moraine; the other, nearly
as large, on angular blocks of granite. No other tree in the Sierra
seems so much at home on earthquake taluses and many of these huge
boulder-slopes are almost exclusively occupied by it.
The Incense Cedar
Incense Cedar (Libocedrus decurrens), already noticed among the Yosemite
trees, is quite generally distributed throughout the pine belt without
exclusively occupying any considerable area, or even making extensive
groves. On the warmer mountain slopes it ascends to about 5000 feet, and
reaches the climate most congenial to it at a height of about 4000 feet,
growing vigorously at this elevation in all kinds of soil and, in
particular, it is capable of enduring more moisture about its roots
than any of its companions excepting only the sequoia.
Casting your eye over the general forest from some ridge-top you
can identify it by the color alone of its spiry summits, a warm
yellow-green. In its youth up to the age of seventy or eighty years,
none of its companions forms so strictly tapered a cone from top to
bottom. As it becomes older it oftentimes grows strikingly irregular
and picturesque. Large branches push out at right angles to the trunk,
forming stubborn elbows and shoot up parallel with the axis. Very
old trees are usually dead at the top. The flat fragrant plumes are
exceedingly beautiful: no waving fern-frond is finer in form and
texture. In its prime the whole tree is thatched with them, but if you
would see the libocedrus in all its glory you must go to the woods in
midwinter when it is laden with myriads of yellow flowers about the
size of wheat grains, forming a noble illustration of Nature's immortal
virility and vigor. The mature cones, about three-fourths of an inch
long, born on the ends of the plumy branchlets, serve to enrich still
more the surpassing beauty of this winter-blooming tree-goldenrod.
The Silver Firs
We come now to the most regularly planted and most clearly defined
of the main forest belts, composed almost exclusively of two Silver
Firs--Abies concolor and Abies magnifica--extending with but little
interruption 450 miles at an elevation of from 5000 to 9000 feet above
the sea. In its youth A. concolor is a charmingly symmetrical tree
with its flat plumy branches arranged in regular whorls around the
whitish-gray axis which terminates in a stout, hopeful shoot, pointing
straight to the zenith, like an admonishing finger. The leaves are
arranged in two horizontal rows along branchlets that commonly are less
than eight years old, forming handsome plumes, pinnated like the fronds
of ferns. The cones are grayish-green when ripe, cylindrical, from three
to four inches long, and one and a half to two inches wide, and stand
upright on the upper horizontal branches. Full-grown trees in favorable
situations are usually about 200 feet high and five or six feet in
diameter. As old age creeps on, the rough bark becomes rougher and
grayer, the branches lose their exact regularity of form, many that are
snow-bent are broken off and the axis often becomes double or otherwise
irregular from accidents to the terminal bud or shoot. Nevertheless,
throughout all the vicissitudes of its three or four centuries of life,
come what may, the noble grandeur of this species, however obscured, is
never lost.
The magnificent Silver Fir, or California Red Fir (Abies magnifica)
is the most symmetrical of all the Sierra giants, far surpassing its
companion species in this respect and easily distinguished from it by
the purplish-red bark, which is also more closely furrowed than that
of the white, and by its larger cones, its more regularly whorled and
fronded branches, and its shorter leaves, which grow all around the
branches and point upward instead of being arranged in two horizontal
rows. The branches are mostly whorled in fives, and stand out from the
straight, red-purple bole in level, or in old trees in drooping collars,
every branch regularly pinnated like fern-fronds, making broad plumes,
singularly rich and sumptuous-looking. The flowers are in their prime
about the middle of June; the male red, growing on the underside of the
branches in crowded profusion, giving a very rich color to all the
trees; the female greenish-yellow, tinged with pink, standing erect on
the upper side of the topmost branches, while the tufts of young leaves,
about as brightly colored as those of the Douglas spruce, make another
grand show. The cones mature in a single season from the flowers. When
mature they are about six to eight inches long, three or four in
diameter, covered with a fine gray down and streaked and beaded with
transparent balsam, very rich and precious-looking, and stand erect like
casks on the topmost branches. The inside of the cone is, if possible,
still more beautiful. The scales and bracts are tinged with red and the
seed-wings are purple with bright iridescence. Both of the silver firs
live between two and three centuries when the conditions about them
are at all favorable. Some venerable patriarch may be seen heavily
storm-marked, towering in severe majesty above the rising generation,
with a protecting grove of hopeful saplings pressing close around his
feet, each dressed with such loving care that not a leaf seems wanting.
Other groups are made up of trees near the prime of life, nicely
arranged as if Nature had culled them with discrimination from all
the rest of the woods. It is from this tree, called Red Fir by the
lumbermen, that mountaineers cut boughs to sleep on when they are so
fortunate as to be within its limit. Two or three rows of the sumptuous
plushy-fronded branches, overlapping along the middle, and a crescent of
smaller plumes mixed to one's taste with ferns and flowers for a pillow,
form the very best bed imaginable. The essence of the pressed leaves
seems to fill every pore of one's body. Falling water makes a soothing
hush, while the spaces between the grand spires afford noble openings
through which to gaze dreamily into the starry sky. The fir woods are
fine sauntering-grounds at almost any time of the year, but finest in
autumn when the noble trees are hushed in the hazy light and drip with
balsam; and the flying, whirling seeds, escaping from the ripe cones,
mottle the air like flocks of butterflies. Even in the richest part of
these unrivaled forests where so many noble trees challenge admiration
we linger fondly among the colossal firs and extol their beauty again
and again, as if no other tree in the world could henceforth claim our
love. It is in these woods the great granite domes arise that are so
striking and characteristic a feature of the Sierra. Here, too, we find
the best of the garden-meadows full of lilies. A dry spot a little
way back from the margin of a silver fir lily-garden makes a glorious
camp-ground, especially where the slope is toward the east with a view
of the distant peaks along the summit of the Range. The tall lilies are
brought forward most impressively like visitors by the light of your
camp-fire and the nearest of the trees with their whorled branches tower
above you like larger lilies and the sky seen through the garden-opening
seems one vast meadow of white lily stars.
The Two-Leaved Pine
The Two-Leaved Pine (Pinus contorta, var. Murrayana), above the Silver
Fir zone, forms the bulk of the alpine forests up to a height of from
8000 to 9500 feet above the sea, growing in beautiful order on moraines
scarcely changed as yet by post-glacial weathering. Compared with the
giants of the lower regions this is a small tree, seldom exceeding a
height of eight or ninety feet. The largest I ever measured was ninety
feet high and a little over six feet in diameter. The average height of
mature trees throughout the entire belt is probably not far from fifty
or sixty feet with a diameter of two feet. It is a well-proportioned,
rather handsome tree with grayish-brown bark and crooked, much-divided
branches which cover the greater part of the trunk, but not so densely
as to prevent it being seen. The lower limbs, like those of most other
conifers that grow in snowy regions, curve downward, gradually take a
horizontal position about half-way up the trunk, then aspire more and
more toward the summit. The short, rigid needles in fascicles of two are
arranged in comparatively long cylindrical tassels at the ends of the
tough up-curving branches. The cones are about two inches long, growing
in clusters among the needles without any striking effect except while
very young, when the flowers are of a vivid crimson color and the whole
tree appears to be dotted with brilliant flowers. The staminate flowers
are still more showy on account of their great abundance, often giving a
reddish-yellow tinge to the whole mass of foliage and filling the air
with pollen. No other pine on the Range is so regularly planted as this
one, covering moraines that extend along the sides of the high rocky
valleys for miles without interruption. The thin bark is streaked and
sprinkled with resin as trough it had been showered upon the forest like
rain.
Therefore this tree more than any other is subject to destruction by
fire. During strong winds extensive forests are destroyed, the flames
leaping from tree to tree in continuous belts that go surging and racing
onward above the bending wood like prairie-grass fires. During the
calm season of Indian summer the fire creeps quietly along the ground,
feeding on the needles and cones; arriving at the foot of a tree, the
resiny bark is ignited and the heated air ascends in a swift current,
increasing in velocity and dragging the flames upward. Then the leaves
catch forming an immense column of fire, beautifully spired on the edges
and tinted a rose-purple hue. It rushes aloft thirty or forty feet above
the top of the tree, forming a grand spectacle, especially at night. It
lasts, however, only a few seconds, vanishing with magical rapidity, to
be succeeded by others along the fire-line at irregular intervals, tree
after tree, upflashing and darting, leaving the trunks and branches
scarcely scarred. The heat, however, is sufficient to kill the tree and
in a few years the bark shrivels and falls off. Forests miles in extent
are thus killed and left standing, with the branches on, but peeled
and rigid, appearing gray in the distance like misty clouds. Later the
branches drop off, leaving a forest of bleached spars. At length the
roots decay and the forlorn gray trunks are blown down during some
storm and piled one upon another, encumbering the ground until, dry and
seasoned, they are consumed by another fire and leave the ground ready
for a fresh crop.
In sheltered lake-hollows, on beds of alluvium, this pine varies so far
from the common form that frequently it could be taken for a distinct
species, growing in damp sods like grasses from forty to eighty feet
high, bending all together to the breeze and whirling in eddying gusts
more lively than any other tree in the woods. I frequently found
specimens fifty feet high less than five inches in diameter. Being so
slender and at the same time clad with leafy boughs, it is often bent
and weighed down to the ground when laden with soft snow; thus forming
fine ornamental arches, many of them to last until the melting of the
snow in the spring.
The Mountain Pine
The Mountain Pine (Pinus monticola) is the noblest tree of the alpine
zone--hardy and long-lived towering grandly above its companions and
becoming stronger and more imposing just where other species begin to
crouch and disappear. At its best it is usually about ninety feet high
and five or six feet in diameter, though you may find specimens here and
there considerably larger than this. It is as massive and suggestive of
enduring strength as an oak. About two-thirds of the trunk is commonly
free of limbs, but close, fringy tufts of spray occur nearly all the way
down to the ground. On trees that occupy exposed situations near its
upper limit the bark is deep reddish-brown and rather deeply furrowed,
the main furrows running nearly parallel to each other and connected on
the old trees by conspicuous cross-furrows. The cones are from four to
eight inches long, smooth, slender, cylindrical and somewhat curved.
They grow in clusters of from three to six or seven and become pendulous
as they increase in weight. This species is nearly related to the sugar
pine and, though not half so tall, it suggests its noble relative in the
way that it extends its long branches in general habit. It is first met
on the upper margin of the silver fir zone, singly, in what appears as
chance situations without making much impression on the general forest.
Continuing up through the forests of the two-leaved pine it begins to
show its distinguishing characteristic in the most marked way at an
elevation of about 10,000 feet extending its tough, rather slender arms
in the frosty air, welcoming the storms and feeding on them and reaching
sometimes to the grand old age of 1000 years.
The Western Juniper
The Juniper or Red Cedar (Juniperus occidentalis) is preëminently a
rock tree, occupying the baldest domes and pavements in the upper silver
fir and alpine zones, at a height of from 7000 to 9500 feet. In such
situations, rooted in narrow cracks or fissures, where there is scarcely
a handful of soil, it is frequently over eight feet in diameter and not
much more in height. The tops of old trees are almost always dead, and
large stubborn-looking limbs push out horizontally, most of them broken
and dead at the end, but densely covered, and imbedded here and there
with tufts or mounds of gray-green scalelike foliage. Some trees are
mere storm-beaten stumps about as broad as long, decorated with a few
leafy sprays, reminding one of the crumbling towers of old castles
scantily draped with ivy. Its homes on bare, barren dome and ridge-top
seem to have been chosen for safety against fire, for, on isolated
mounds of sand and gravel free from grass and bushes on which fire could
feed, it is often found growing tall and unscathed to a height of forty
to sixty feet, with scarce a trace of the rocky angularity and broken
limbs so characteristic a feature throughout the greater part of its
range. It never makes anything like a forest; seldom even a grove.
Usually it stands out separate and independent, clinging by slight
joints to the rocks, living chiefly on snow and thin air and maintaining
sound health on this diet for 2000 years or more. Every feature or every
gesture it makes expresses steadfast, dogged endurance. The bark is of
a bright cinnamon color and is handsomely braided and reticulated on
thrifty trees, flaking off in thin, shining ribbons that are sometimes
used by the Indians for tent matting. Its fine color and picturesqueness
are appreciated by artists, but to me the juniper seems a singularly
strange and taciturn tree. I have spent many a day and night in its
company and always have found it silent and rigid. It seems to be a
survivor of some ancient race, wholly unacquainted with its neighbors.
Its broad stumpiness, of course, makes wind-waving or even shaking out
of the question, but it is not this rocky rigidity that constitutes its
silence. In calm, sun-days the sugar pine preaches like an enthusiastic
apostle without moving a leaf. On level rocks the juniper dies standing
and wastes insensibly out of existence like granite, the wind exerting
about as little control over it, alive or dead, as is does over a
glacier boulder.
I have spent a good deal of time trying to determine the age of these
wonderful trees, but as all of the very old ones are honey-combed with
dry rot I never was able to get a complete count of the largest. Some
are undoubtedly more than 2000 years old, for though on deep moraine
soil they grow about as fast as some of the pines, on bare pavements and
smoothly glaciated, overswept ridges in the dome region they grow very
slowly. One on the Starr King Ridge only two feet eleven inches in
diameter was 1140 years old forty years ago. Another on the same ridge,
only one foot seven and a half inches in diameter, had reached the age
of 834 years. The first fifteen inches from the bark of a medium-size
tree six feet in diameter, on the north Tenaya pavement, had 859 layers
of wood. Beyond this the count was stopped by dry rot and scars. The
largest examined was thirty-three feet in girth, or nearly ten feet in
diameter and, although I have failed to get anything like a complete
count, I learned enough from this and many other specimens to convince
me that most of the trees eight or ten feet thick, standing on
pavements, are more than twenty centuries old rather than less. Barring
accidents, for all I can see they would live forever; even then
overthrown by avalanches, they refuse to lie at rest, lean stubbornly
on their big branches as if anxious to rise, and while a single root
holds to the rock, put forth fresh leaves with a grim, never-say-die
expression.
The Mountain Hemlock
As the juniper is the most stubborn and unshakeable of trees in the
Yosemite region, the Mountain Hemlock (Tsuga Mertensiana) is the most
graceful and pliant and sensitive. Until it reaches a height of fifty or
sixty feet it is sumptuously clothed down to the ground with drooping
branches, which are divided again and again into delicate waving
sprays, grouped and arranged in ways that are indescribably beautiful,
and profusely adorned with small brown cones. The flowers also are
peculiarly beautiful and effective; the female dark rich purple, the
male blue, of so fine and pure a tone. What the best azure of the
mountain sky seems to be condensed in them. Though apparently the most
delicate and feminine of all the mountain trees, it grows best where
the snow lies deepest, at a height of from 9000 to 9500 feet, in
hollows on the northern slopes of mountains and ridges. But under all
circumstances, sheltered from heavy winds or in bleak exposure to them,
well fed or starved, even at its highest limit, 10,500 feet above the
sea, on exposed ridge-tops where it has to crouch and huddle close in
low thickets, it still contrives to put forth its sprays and branches in
forms of invincible beauty, while on moist, well-drained moraines it
displays a perfectly tropical luxuriance of foliage, flowers and fruit.
The snow of the first winter storm is frequently soft, and lodges in due
dense leafy branches, weighing them down against the trunk, and the
slender, drooping axis, bending lower and lower as the load increases,
at length reaches the ground, forming an ornamental arch. Then, as storm
succeeds storm and snow is heaped on snow, the whole tree is at last
buried, not again to see the light of day or move leaf or limb until set
free by the spring thaws in June or July. Not only the young saplings
are thus carefully covered and put to sleep in the whitest of white beds
for five or six months of the year, but trees thirty feet high or more.
From April to May, when the snow by repeated thawing and freezing is
firmly compacted, you may ride over the prostrate groves without seeing
a single branch or leaf of them. No other of our alpine conifers so
finely veils its strength; poised in thin, white sunshine, clad with
branches from head to foot, it towers in unassuming majesty, drooping
as if unaffected with the aspiring tendencies of its race, loving the
ground, conscious of heaven and joyously receptive of its blessings,
reaching out its branches like sensitive tentacles, feeling the light
and reveling in it. The largest specimen I ever found was nineteen
feet seven inches in circumference. It was growing on the edge of Lake
Hollow, north of Mount Hoffman, at an elevation of 9250 feet above the
level of the sea, and was probably about a hundred feet in height. Fine
groves of mature trees, ninety to a hundred feet in height, are growing
near the base of Mount Conness. It is widely distributed from near the
south extremity of the high Sierra northward along the Cascade Mountains
of Oregon and Washington and the coast ranges of British Columbia to
Alaska, where it was first discovered in 1827. Its northernmost limit,
so far as I have observed, is in the icy fiords of Prince William Sound
in latitude 61°, where it forms pure forests at the level of the
sea, growing tall find majestic on the banks of glaciers. There, as in
the Yosemite region, it is ineffably beautiful, the very loveliest of
all the American conifers.
The White-Bark Pine
The Dwarf Pine, or White-Bark Pine (Pinus albicaulis), forms the extreme
edge of the timberline throughout nearly the whole extent of the Range
on both flanks. It is first met growing with the two-leaved pine on the
upper margin of the alpine belt, as an erect tree from fifteen to thirty
feet high and from one to two feet in diameter hence it goes straggling
up the flanks of the summit peaks, upon moraines or crumbling ledges,
wherever it can get a foothold, to an elevation of from 10,000 to 12,000
feet, where it dwarfs to a mass of crumpled branches, covered with
slender shoots, each tipped with a short, close-packed, leaf tassel. The
bark is smooth and purplish, in some places almost white. The flowers
are bright scarlet and rose-purple, giving a very flowery appearance
little looked for in such a tree. The cones are about three inches long,
an inch and a half in diameter, grow in rigid clusters, and are dark
chocolate in color while young, and bear beautiful pearly-white seeds
about the size of peas, most of which are eaten by chipmunks and the
Clarke's crows. Pines are commonly regarded as sky-loving trees that
must necessarily aspire or die. This species forms a marked exception,
crouching and creeping in compliance with the most rigorous demands of
climate; yet enduring bravely to a more advanced age than many of its
lofty relatives in the sun-lands far below it. Seen from a distance it
would never be taken for a tree of any kind. For example, on Cathedral
Peak there is a scattered growth of this pine, creeping like mosses over
the roof, nowhere giving hint of an ascending axis. While, approached
quite near, it still appears matty and heathy, and one experiences no
difficulty in walking over the top of it, yet it is seldom absolutely
prostrate, usually attaining a height of three or four feet with a main
trunk, and with branches outspread above it, as if in ascending they
had been checked by a ceiling against which they had been compelled to
spread horizontally. The winter snow is a sort of ceiling, lasting half
the year; while the pressed surface is made yet smoother by violent
winds armed with cutting sand-grains that bear down any shoot which
offers to rise much above the general level, and that carve the dead
trunks and branches in beautiful patterns.
During stormy nights I have often camped snugly beneath the interlacing
arches of this little pine. The needles, which have accumulated for
centuries, make fine beds, a fact well known to other mountaineers, such
as deer and wild sheep, who paw out oval hollows and lie beneath the
larger trees in safe and comfortable concealment. This lowly dwarf
reaches a far greater age than would be guessed. A specimen that I
examined, growing at an elevation of 10,700 feet, yet looked as though
it might be plucked up by the roots, for it was only three and a half
inches in diameter and its topmost tassel reached hardly three feet
above the ground. Cutting it half through and counting the annual rings
with the aid of a lens, I found its age to be no less than 255 years.
Another specimen about the same height, with a trunk six inches in
diameter, I found to be 426 years old, forty years ago; and one of its
supple branchlets hardly an eighth of an inch in diameter inside the
bark, was seventy-five years old, and so filled with oily balsam and
seasoned by storms that I tied it in knots like a whip-cord.
The Nut Pine
In going across the Range from the Tuolumne River Soda Springs to Mono
Lake one makes the acquaintance of the curious little Nut Pine (Pinus
monophylla). It dots the eastern flank of the Sierra to which it is
mostly restricted in grayish bush-like patches, from the margin of the
sage-plains to an elevation of from 7000 to 8000 feet. A more contented,
fruitful and unaspiring conifer could not be conceived. All the species
we have been sketching make departures more or less distant from the
typical spire form, but none goes so far as this. Without any apparent
cause it keeps near the ground, throwing out crooked, divergent branches
like an orchard apple-tree, and seldom pushes a single shoot higher than
fifteen or twenty feet above the ground.
The average thickness of the trunk is, perhaps, about ten or twelve
inches. The leaves are mostly undivided, like round awls, instead of
being separated, like those of other pines, into twos and threes and
fives. The cones are green while growing, and are usually found over all
the tree, forming quite a marked feature as seen against the bluish-gray
foliage. They are quite small, only about two inches in length, and seem
to have but little space for seeds; but when we come to open them, we
find that about half the entire bulk of the cone is made up of sweet,
nutritious nuts, nearly as large as hazel-nuts. This is undoubtedly the
most important food-tree on the Sierra, and furnishes the Mona, Carson,
and Walker River Indians with more and better nuts than all the other
species taken together. It is the Indian's own tree, and many a white
man have they killed for cutting it down. Being so low, the cones are
readily beaten off with poles, and the nuts procured by roasting them
until the scales open. In bountiful seasons a single Indian may gather
thirty or forty bushels.
Writings of John Muir
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