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THE coniferous forests of the
Yosemite Park, and of the Sierra in general, surpass all others of their
kind in America or indeed in the world, not only in the size and beauty of
the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur
of the mountains they are growing on. Leaving the workaday lowlands, and
wandering into the heart of the mountains, we find a new world, and stand
beside the majestic pines and firs and sequoias silent and awe-stricken, as
if in the presence of superior beings new arrived from some other star, so
calm and bright and godlike they are.
Going to the woods is going
home; for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of
nature's forests the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome
creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled
vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and
making life a hard struggle. Here everything is hospitable and kind, as if
planned for your pleasure, ministering to every want of body and soul. Even
the storms are friendly and seem to regard you as a brother, their beauty
and tremendous fateful earnestness. charming alike. But the weather is
mostly sunshine, both winter and summer, and the clear sunny brightness of
the park is one of its most striking characteristics. Even the heaviest
portions of the main forest belt, where the trees are tallest and stand
closest, are not in the least gloomy. The sunshine falls in glory through
the colossal spires and crowns, each a symbol of health and strength, the
noble shafts faithfully upright like the pillars of temples, upholding a
roof of infinite leafy interlacing arches and fretted skylights. The more
open portions are like spacious parks, carpeted with small shrubs, or only
with the fallen needles sprinkled here and there with flowers. In some
places, where the ground is level or slopes gently, the trees are assembled
in groves, and the flowers and underbrush in trim beds and thickets as in
landscape gardens or the lovingly planted grounds of homes; or they are
drawn up in orderly rows around meadows and lakes and along the brows of
canons. But in general the forests are distributed in wide belts in
accordance with climate and the comparative strength of each kind in gaining
and holding possession of the ground, while anything like monotonous
uniformity is prevented by the grandly varied topography, and by the
arrangement of the best soilbeds in intricate patterns like embroidery; for
these soilbeds are the moraines of ancient glaciers more or less modified by
weathering and stream action, and the trees trace them over the hills and
ridges, and far up the sides of the mountains, rising with even growth on
levels, and towering above one another on the long rich slopes prepared for
them by the vanished glaciers.
Had the Sierra forests been
cheaply accessible, the most valuable of them commercially would ere this
have fallen a prey to the lumberman. Thus far the redwood of the Coast
Mountains and the Douglas spruce of Oregon and Washington have been more
available for lumber than the pine of the Sierra. It cost less to go a
thousand miles up the coast for timber, where the trees came down to the
shores of navigable rivers and bays, than fifty miles up the mountains.
Nevertheless, the superior value of the sugar pine for many purposes has
tempted capitalists to expend large sums on flumes and railroads to reach
the best forests, though perhaps none of these enterprises has paid.
Fortunately, the lately established system of parks and reservations has put
a stop to any great extension of the business hereabouts in its most
destructive forms. And as the Yosemite Park region has escaped the milimen,
and the all-devouring hordes of hoofed locusts have been banished, it is
still in the main a pure wilderness, unbroken by axe clearings except on the
lower margin, where a few settlers have opened spots beside hay meadows for
their cabins and gardens. But these are mere dots of cultivation, in no
appreciable degree disturbing the grand solitude. Twenty or thirty years ago
a good many trees were felled for their seeds; traces of this destructive
method of seed-collecting are still visible along the trails; but these as
well as the shingle-makers' ruins are being rapidly overgrown, the gardens
and beds of underbrush once devastated by sheep are blooming again in all
their wild glory, and the park is a paradise that makes even the loss of
Eden seem insignificant.
On the way to Yosemite
Valley, you get some grand views over the forests of the Merced and Tuolumne
basins and glimpses of some of the finest trees by the roadside without
leaving your seat in the stage. But to learn how they live and behave in
pure wildness, to see them in their varying aspects through the seasons and
weather, rejoicing in the great storms, in the spiritual mountain light,
putting forth their new leaves and flowers when all the streams are in flood
and the birds are singing, and sending away their seeds: in the thoughtful
Indian summer when all the landscape is glowing in deep, calm enthusiasm, -
for this you must love them and live with them, as free from schemes and
cares and time as the trees themselves.
And surely nobody will find anything hard in
this. Even the blind must enjoy these woods, drinking their fragrance,
listening to the music of the winds in their groves, and fingering their
flowers and plumes and cones and richly furrowed boles. The kind of study
required is as easy and natural as breathing. Without any great knowledge of
botany or wood-craft, in a single season you may learn the name and
something more of nearly every kind of tree in the park.
With few exceptions all the Sierra trees are
growing in the park, -nine species of pine, two of silver fir, one each of
Douglas spruce, libocedrus, hemlock, juniper, and sequoia, - sixteen
conifers in all, and about the same number of round-headed trees, oaks,
maples, poplars, laurel, alder, dogwood, tumion, etc.
The first of the conifers you meet in going up
the range from the west is the. digger nut pine (Pinus Sabiniana), a
remarkably open, airy, wide-branched tree, forty to sixty feet high, with
long, sparse, grayish green foliage and large cones. At a height of fifteen
to thirty feet from the ground the trunk usually divides into several main
branches, which, after bearing away from one another, shoot straight up and
form separate heads as if the axis of the tree had been broken, while the
secondary branches divide again and again into rather slender sprays loosely
tasseled, with leaves eight to twelve inches long. The yellow and purple
flowers are about an inch long, the staminate in showy clusters. The big,
rough, burly cones, five to eight or ten inches in length and five or six in
diameter, are rich brown in color when ripe, and full of hard-shelled nuts
that are greatly prized by Indians and squirrels. This strange-looking pine,
enjoying hot sunshine like a palm, is sparsely distributed along the driest
part of the Sierra among small oaks and chaparral, and with its gray mist of
foliage, strong trunk and branches, and big cones seen in relief on the
glowing sky, forms the most striking feature of the foothill vegetation.
Pinus attenuata is a small, slender, arrowy
tree, with pale green leaves in threes, clustered flowers half an inch long,
brownish yellow and crimson, and cones whorled in conspicuous clusters
around the branches and also around the trunk. The cones never fall off or
open until the tree dies. They are about four inches long, exceedingly
strong and solid, and varnished with hard resin forming a waterproof and
almost worm and squirrel proof package, in which the seeds are kept fresh
and safe during the lifetime of the tree. Sometimes one of the trunk cones
is overgrown and imbedded in the heart wood like a knot, but nearly all are
pushed out and kept on the surface by the pressure of the successive layers
of wood against the base.
This admirable little tree grows on brushy,
sun-beaten slopes, which from their position and the inflammable character
of the vegetation are most frequently fire-swept. These grounds it is able
to hold against all corners, however big and strong, by saving its seeds
until death, when all it has produced are scattered over the bare cleared
ground, and a new generation quickly springs out of the ashes. Thus the
curious fact that all the trees of extensive groves and belts are of the
same age is accounted for, and their slender habit; for the lavish abundance
of seed sown at the same time makes a crowded growth, and the seedlings with
an even start rush up in a hurried race for light and life.
Only a few of the attenuata and Sabiniana pines
are within the boundaries of the park, the former on the side of the Merced
Caņon, the latter on the walls of Hetch-Hetchy Valley and in the caņon below
it.
The nut pine (Pinus mono phylla) is a small, hardy, contented-looking tree,
about fifteen or twenty feet high and a foot in diameter. In its youth the
close radiating and aspiring branches form a handsome broad-based pyramid,
but when fully grown it becomes round-topped, knotty, and irregular,
throwing out crooked divergent limbs like an apple tree. The leaves are pale
grayish green, about an inch and a half long, and instead of being divided
into clusters they are single, round, sharp-pointed, and rigid like spikes,
amid which in the spring the red flowers glow brightly. The cones are only
about two inches in length and breadth, but nearly half of their bulk is
made up of sweet nuts.
This fruitful little pine grows on the dry east side of the park, along the
margin of the Mono sage plain, and is the commonest tree of the short
mountain ranges of the Great Basin. Tens of thousands of acres are covered
with it, forming bountiful orchards for the Red-man. Being so low and
accessible, the cones are easily beaten off with poles, and the nuts
procured by roasting until the scales open. To the tribes of the desert and
sage plains these seeds are the staff of life. They are eaten either raw or
parched, or in the form of mush or cakes after being pounded into meal. The
time of nut harvest in the autumn is the Indian's merriest time of all the
year. An industrious squirrelish family can gather fifty or sixty bushels in
a single month before the snow comes, and then their bread for the winter is
sure. The white pine (Pinus
flexilis) is widely distributed through the Rocky Mountains and the ranges
of the Great Basin, where in many places it grows to a good size, and is an
important timber tree where none better is to be found. In the park it is
sparsely scattered along the eastern flank of the range from Mono Pass
southward, above the nut pine, at an elevation of from eight to ten thousand
feet, dwarfing to a tangled bush near the timberline, but under favorable
conditions attaining a height of forty or fifty feet, with a diameter of
three to five. The long branches show a tendency to sweep out in bold
curves, like those of the mountain and sugar pines to which it is closely
related. The needles are in clusters of five, closely packed on the ends of
the branchiets. The cones are about five inches long, - the smaller ones
nearly oval, the larger cylindrical. But the most interesting feature of the
tree is its bloom, the vivid red pistillate flowers glowing among the leaves
like coals of fire. The
dwarfed pine or white-barked pine (Pinus albicaulis) is sure to interest
every observer on account of its curious low matted habit, and the great
height on the snowy mountains at which it bravely grows. It forms the
extreme edge of the timber-line on both flanks of the summit mountains - if
so lowly a tree can be called timber - at an elevation of ten to twelve
thousand feet above the level of the sea. Where it is first met on the lower
limit of its range it may be thirty or forty feet high, but farther up the
rocky wind-swept slopes, where the snow lies deep and heavy for six months
of the year, it makes shaggy clumps and beds, crinkled and pressed fiat,
over which you can easily walk. Nevertheless in this crushed, down-pressed,
felted condition it clings hardily to life, puts forth fresh leaves every
spring on the ends of its tasseled branch- lets, blooms bravely in the
lashing blasts with abundance of gay red and purple flowers, matures its
seeds in the short summers, and often outlives the favored giants of the sun
lands far below. One of the trees that I examined was only about three feet
high, with a stem six inches in diameter at the ground, and branches that
spread out horizontally as if they had grown up against a ceiling; yet it
was four hundred and twenty-six years old, and one of its supple branchiets,
about an eighth of an inch in diameter inside the bark, was seventy-five
years old, and so tough that I tied it into knots. At the age of this dwarf
many of the sugar and yellow pines and sequoias are seven feet in diameter
and over two hundred feet high.
In detached clumps never touched by fire the
fallen needles of centuries of growth make fine elastic mattresses for the
weary mountaineer, while the tasseled branchiets spread a roof over him, and
the dead roots, half resin, usually found in abundance, make capital
camp-fires, unquenchable in thickest storms of rain or snow. Seen from a
distance the belts and patches darkening the mountain sides look like mosses
on a roof, and bring to mind Dr. Johnson's remarks on the trees of Scotland.
His guide, anxious for the honor of Mull, was still talking of its woods and
pointing them out. "Sir," said Johnson, "I saw at Tobermory what they called
a wood, which I unluckily took for heath. If you show me what I shall take
for furze, it will be something."
The mountain pine (Pinus monticola) is far the
largest of the Sierra tree mountaineers. Climbing nearly as high as the
dwarf albicaulis, it is still a giant in size, bold and strong, stand-. ing
erect on the storm-beaten peaks and ridges, tossing its cone-laden branches
in the rough winds, living a thousand years, and reaching its greatest size
-ninety to a hundred feet in height, six to eight in diameter - just where
other trees, its companions, are dwarfed. But it is not able to endure
burial in snow so long as the albicaulis and fiexilis. Therefore, on the
upper limit of its range it is found on slopes which, from their steepness
or exposure, are least snowy. Its soft graceful beauty in youth, and its
leaves, cones, and outsweeping feathery branches constantly remind you of
the sugar pine, to which it is closely allied. An admirable tree, growing
nobler in form and size the colder and balder the mountains about it.
The giants of the main forest in the favored
middle region are the sequoia, sugar pine, yellow pine, libocedrus, Douglas
spruce, and the two silver firs. The park sequoias are restricted to two
small groves, a few miles apart, on the Tuolumne and Merced divide, about
seventeen miles from Yosemite Valley. The Big Oak Flat road to the valley
runs through the Tuolumne Grove, the Coulterville through the Merced. The
more famous and better known Mariposa Grove, belonging to the state, lies
near the southwest corner of the park, a few miles above Wawona.
The sugar pine (Pinus Lambertiana) is first met
in the park in open, sunny, flowery woods, at an elevation of about
thirty-five hundred feet above the sea, attains full development at a height
between five and six thousand feet, and vanishes at the level of eight
thousand feet. In many places, especially on the northern slopes of the main
ridges between the rivers, it forms the bulk of the forest, but mostly it is
intimately associated with its noble companions, above which it towers in
glorious majesty on every hill, ridge, and plateau from one extremity of the
range to the other, a distance of five hundred miles, - the largest,
noblest, and most beautiful of all the seventy or eighty species of pine
trees in the world, and of all the conifers second only to King Sequoia.
A good many are from two hundred to two hundred
and twenty feet in height, with a diameter at four feet from the ground of
six to eight feet, and occasionally a grand patriarch, seven or eight
hundred years old, is found that is ten or even twelve feet in diameter and
two hundred and forty feet high, with a magnificent crown seventy feet wide.
David Douglas, who discovered "this most beautiful and immensely grand tree"
in the fall of 1826 in southern Oregon, says that the largest of several
that had been blown down, "at three feet from the ground was fifty-seven
feet nine inches in circumference" (or fully eighteen feet in diameter); "at
one hundred and thirty-four feet, seventeen feet five inches; extreme
length, two hundred and forty-five feet." Probably for fifty-seven we should
read thirty-seven for the base measurement, which would make it correspond
with the other dimensions; for none of this species with anything like so
great a girth has since been seen. A girth of even thirty feet is uncommon.
A fallen specimen that I measured was nine feet three inches in diameter
inside the bark at four feet from the ground, and six feet in diameter at a
hundred feet from the ground. A comparatively young tree, three hundred and
thirty years old, that had been cut down, measured seven feet across the
stump, was three feet three inches in diameter at a height of one hundred
and fifty feet, and two hundred and ten feet in length.
The trunk is a round, delicately tapered shaft
with finely furrowed purplish-brown bark, usually free of limbs for a
hundred feet or more. The top is furnished with long and comparatively
slender branches, which sweep gracefully downward and outward, feathered
with short tasseled branchiets, and divided only at the ends, forming a
palmlike crown fifty to seventy-five feet wide, but without the monotonous
uniformity of palm crowns or of the spires of most conifers. The old trees
are as tellingly varied and picturesque as oaks. No two are alike, and we
are tempted to stop and admire every one we come to, whether as it stands
silent in the calm balsam-scented sunshine or waving in accord with
enthusiastic storms. The leaves are about three or four inches long, in
clusters of five, finely tempered, bright lively green, and radiant. The
flowers are but little larger than those of the dwarf pine, and far less
showy. The immense cylindrical cones, fifteen to twenty or even twenty-four
inches long and three in diameter, hang singly or in clusters, like
ornamental tassels, at the ends of the long branches, green, flushed with
purple on the sunward side. Like those of almost all the pines they ripen in
the autumn of the second season from the flower, and the seeds of all that
have escaped the Indians, bears, and squirrels take wing and fly to their
places. Then the cones become still more effective as ornaments, for by the
spreading of the scales the diameter is nearly doubled, and the color
changes to a rich brown. They remain on the tree the following winter and
summer; therefore few fertile trees are ever found without them. Nor even
after they fall is the beauty work of these grand cones done, for they make
a fine show on the flowery, needle-strewn ground. The wood is pale yellow,
fine in texture, and deliciously fragrant. The sugar, which gives name to
the tree, exudes from the heart wood on wounds made by fire or the axe, and
forms irregular crisp white candy-like masses. To the taste of most people
it is as good as maple sugar, though it cannot be eaten in large quantities.
No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will
ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns
approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches
of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately
columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.
The yellow pine (Pinus ponderosa) is surpassed
in size and nobleness of port only by its kingly companion. Full-grown trees
in the main forest where it is associated with the sugar pine, are about one
hundred and seventy- five feet high, with a diameter of five to six feet,
though much larger specimens may easily be found. The largest I ever
measured was a little over eight feet in diameter four feet above the
ground, and two hundred and twenty feet high. Where there is plenty of
sunshine and other conditions are favorable, it is a massive symmetrical
spire, formed of a strong straight shaft clad with innumerable branches,
which are divided again and again into stout branch- lets laden with bright
shining needles and green or purple cones. Where the growth is at all close
half or more of the trunk is branchless. The species attains its greatest
size and most majestic form in open groves on the deep, well-drained soil of
lake basins at an elevation of about four thousand feet. There nearly all
the old trees are over two hundred feet high, and the heavy, leafy,
much-divided branches sumptuously clothe the trunk almost to the ground.
Such trees are easily climbed, and in going up the winding stairs of knotty
limbs to the top you will gain a most telling and memorable idea of the
height, the richness and intricacy of the branches, and the marvelous
abundance and beauty of the long shining elastic foliage. In tranquil
weather, you will see the firm outstanding needles in calm content,
shimmering and throwing off keen minute rays of light like lances of ice;
but when heavy winds are blowing, the strong towers bend and wave in the
blast with eager wide awake enthusiasm, and every tree in the grove glows
and flashes in one mass of white sunfire.
Both the yellow and sugar pines grow rapidly on
good soil where they are not crowded. At the age of a hundred years they are
about two feet in diameter and a hundred or more high. They are then very
handsome, though very unlike: the sugar pine, lithe, feathery, closely clad
with ascending branches; the yellow, open, showing its axis from the ground
to the top, its whorled branches but little divided as yet, spreading and
turning up at the ends with magnificent tassels of long stout bright
needles, the terminal shoot with its leaves being often three or four feet
long and a foot and a half wide, the most hopeful looking and the handsomest
tree-top in the woods. But instead of increasing, like its companion, in
wildness and individuality of form with age, it becomes more evenly and
compactly spiry. The bark is usually very thick, four to six inches at the
ground, and arranged in large plates, some of them on the lower part of the
trunk four or five feet long and twelve to eighteen inches wide, forming a
strong defense against fire. The leaves are in threes, and from three inches
to a foot long. The flowers appear in May: the staminate pink or brown, in
conspicuous clusters two or three inches wide; the pistillate crimson, a
fourth of an inch wide, and mostly hidden among the leaves on the tips of
the branchiets. The cones vary from about three to ten inches in length, two
to five in width, and grow in sessile outstanding clusters near the ends of
the upturned branchiets.
Being able to endure fire and hunger and many
climates this grand tree is widely distributed: eastward from the coast
across the broad Rocky Mountain ranges to the Black Hills of Dakota, a
distance of more than a thousand miles, and southward from British Columbia,
near latitude 51°, to Mexico, about fifteen hundred miles. South of the
Columbia River it meets the sugar pine, and accompanies it all the way down
along the Coast and Cascade mountains and the Sierra and southern ranges to
the mountains of the peninsula of Lower California, where they find their
southmost homes together. Pinus ponderosa is extremely variable, and much
bother it gives botanists who try to catch and confine the unmanageable
proteus in two or a dozen species, - Jeffreyi, defiexa, Apacheca latifoha,
etc. But in all its wanderings, in every form, it manifests noble strength.
Clad in thick bark like a warner in mail, it extends its bright ranks over
all the high ranges of the wild side of the continent: flourishes in the
drenching fog and rain of the northern coast at the level of the sea, in the
snow-laden blasts of the mountains, and the white glaring sunshine of the
interior plateaus and plains, on the borders of mirage-haunted deserts,
volcanoes, and lava beds, waving its bright plumes in the hot winds
undaunted, blooming every year for centuries, and tossing big ripe cones
among the cinders and ashes of nature's hearths.
The Douglas spruce grows with the great pines,
especially on the cool north sides of ridges and caflons, and is here nearly
as large as the yellow pine, but less abundant. The wood is strong and
tough, the bark thick and deeply furrowed, and on vigorous, quick- growing
trees the stout, spreading branches are covered with innumerable slender,
swaying sprays, handsomely clothed with short leaves. The flowers are about
three fourths of an inch in length, red or greenish, not so showy as the
pendulous bracted cones. But, in June and July, when the young bright yellow
leaves appear, the entire tree seems to be covered with bloom.
It is this grand tree that forms the famous
forests of western Oregon, Washington, and the adjacent coast regions of
British Columbia, where it attains its greatest size and is most abundant,
making almost pure forests over thousands of square miles, dark and close
and almost inaccessible, many of the trees towering with straight,
imperceptibly tapered shafts to a height of three hundred feet, their heads
together shutting out the light, - one of the largest, most widely
distributed, and most important of all the Western giants.
The incense cedar (Libocedrus decvrrens), when
full grown, is a magnificent tree, one hundred and twenty to nearly two
hundred feet high, five to eight and occasionally twelve feet in diameter,
with cinnamon-colored bark and warm yellow-green foliage, and in general
appearance like an arbor-vit. It is distributed through the main forest from
an elevation of three to six thousand feet, and in sheltered portions of
canons on the warm sides to seven thousand five hundred. In midwinter, when
most trees are asleep, it puts forth its flowers. The pistillate are pale
green and inconspicuous; but the staminate are yellow, about one fourth of
an inch long, and are produced in myriads, tingeing all the branches with
gold, and making the tree as it stands in the snow look like a gigantic
goldenrod. Though scattered rather sparsely amongst its companions in the
open woods, it is seldom out of sight, and its bright brown shafts and warm
masses of plumy foliage make a striking feature of the landscape. While
young and growing fast in an open situation no other tree of its size in the
park forms so exactly tapered a pyramid. The branches, outspread in flat
plumes and beautifully fronded, sweep gracefully downward and outward,
except those near the top, which aspire; the lowest droop to the ground,
overlapping one another, shedding off rain and snow, and making fine tents
for storm-bound mountaineers and birds. In old age it becomes irregular and
picturesque, mostly from accidents: running fires, heavy wet snow breaking
the branches, lightning shattering the top, compelling it to try to make new
summits out of side branches, etc. Still it frequently lives more than a
thousand years, invincibly beautiful, and worthy its place beside the
Douglas spruce and the great pines.
This unrivaled forest is still further enriched
by two majestic silver firs, Abies magnifica and Abies concolor, bands of
which come down from the main fir belt by cool shady ridges and glens. Abies
magnifica is the noblest of its race, growing on moraines, at an elevation
of seven thousand to eight thousand five hundred feet above the sea, to a
height of two hundred or two hundred and fifty feet, and five to seven in
diameter; and with these noble dimensions there is a richness and symmetry
and perfection of finish not to be found in any other tree in the Sierra.
The branches are whorled, in fives mostly, and stand out from the straight
red purple bole in level or, on old trees, in drooping collars, every branch
regularly pinnated like fern fronds, and clad with silvery needles, making
broad plumes singularly rich and sumptuous.
The flowers are in their prime about the middle
of June: the staminate red, growing on the underside of the branchiets in
crowded profusion, giving a rich color to nearly all the tree; the
pistillate 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, push out their fragrant
brown buds a few weeks later, making another grand show.
The cones mature in a single season from the
flowers. When full grown they are about six to eight inches long, three or
four in diameter, blunt, massive, cylindrical, greenish gray in color,
covered with a fine silvery down, and beaded with transparent balsam, very
rich and precious-looking, standing erect like casks on the topmost
branches. If possible, the inside of the cone is still more beautiful. The
scales and bracts are tinged with red, and the seed wings are purple with
bright iridescence.
Abies concolor, the white silver fir, grows best about two thousand feet
lower than the magnifica. It is nearly as large, but the branches are less
regularly pinnated and whorled, the leaves are longer, and instead of
standing out around the branchiets or turning up and clasping them they are
mostly arranged in two horizontal or ascending rows, and the cones are less
than half as large. The bark of the magnifica is reddish purple and closely
furrowed, that of the concolor is gray and widely furrowed, - a noble pair,
rivaled only by the Abies grandis, amabilis, and nobilis of the forests of
Oregon, Washington, and the Northern California Coast Range. But none of
these northern species form pure forests that in extent and beauty approach
those of the Sierra.
The seeds of the conifers are curiously formed and colored, white, brown,
purple, plain or spotted like birds' eggs, and excepting the juniper they
are all handsomely and ingeniously winged with reference to their
distribution. They are a sort of cunningly devised flying machines, -
one-winged birds, birds with but one feather, - and they take but one
flight, all save those which, after flying from the cone-nest in calm
weather, chance to alight on branches where they have to wait for a wind.
And though these seed wings are intended for only a moment's use, they are
as thoughtfully colored and fashioned as the wings of birds, and require
from one to two seasons to grow. Those of the pine, fir, hemlock, and spruce
are curved in such manner that, in being dragged through the air by the
seeds, they are made to revolve, whirling the seeds in C. close spiral, and
sustaining them long enough to allow the winds to carry them to considerable
distances, - a style of flying full of quick merry motion, strikingly
contrasted to the sober dignified sailing of seeds on tufts of feathery
pappus. Surely no merrier adventurers ever set out to seek their fortunes.
Only in the fir woods are large flocks seen; for, unlike the cones of the
pine, spruce, hemlock, etc., which let the seeds escape slowly, one or two
at a time, by spreading the scales, the fir cones when ripe fall to pieces,
and let nearly all go at once in favorable weather. All along the Sierra for
hundreds of miles, on dry breezy autumn days, the sunny spaces in the woods
among the colossal spires are in a whirl with these shining purple-winged
wanderers, notwithstanding the harvesting squirrels have been working at the
top of their speed for weeks trying to cut off every cone before the seeds
were ready to swarm and fly. Sequoia seeds have flat wings, and glint and
glance in their flight like a boy's kite. The dispersal of juniper seeds is
effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their
board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.
Above the great fir belt, and below the ragged
beds and fringes of the dwarf pine, stretch the broad dark forests of Pinus
conlorta, var. Murra.yana, usually called tamarack pine. On broad fields of
moraine material it forms nearly pure forests at an elevation of about eight
or nine thousand feet above the sea, where it is a small, well-proportioned
tree, fifty or sixty feet high and one or two in diameter, with thin gray
bark, crooked much- divided straggling branches, short needles in clusters
of two, bright yellow and crimson flowers, and small prickly cones. The very
largest I ever measured was ninety feet in height, and a little over six
feet in diameter four feet above the ground. On moist well- drained soil in
sheltered hollows along stream-sides it grows tall and slender with
ascending branches, making graceful arrowy spires fifty to seventy-five feet
high, with stems only five or six inches thick.
The most extensive forest of this pine in the
park lies to the north of the Big Tuolumne Meadows, - a famous deer pasture
and hunting ground of the Mono Indians. For miles over wide moraine beds
there is an even, nearly pure growth, broken only by glacier meadows, around
which the trees stand in trim array, their sharp spires showing to fine
advantage both in green flowery summer and white winter. On account of the
closeness of its growth in many places, and the thinness and gumminess of
its bark, it is easily killed by running fires, which work widespread
destruction in its ranks; but a new generation rises quickly from the ashes,
for all or a part of its seeds are held in reserve for a year or two or many
years, and when the tree is killed the cones open and the seeds are
scattered over the burned ground like those of the attenuata.
Next to the mountain hemlock and the dwarf pine
this species best endures burial in heavy snow, while in braving hunger and
cold on rocky ridgetops it is not surpassed by any. It is distributed from
Alaska to southern California, and inland across the Rocky Mound tains,
taking many forms in accordance with demands of climate, soil, rivals, and
enemies; growing patiently in bogs and on sand dunes beside the sea where it
is pelted with salt scud, on high snowy mountains and down in the throats of
extinct volcanoes; springing up with invincible vigor after every
devastating fire and extending its conquests farther.
The sturdy storm-enduring red cedar (Juniperus
occidentalis) delights to dwell on the tops of granite domes and ridges and
glacier pavements of the upper pine belt, at an elevation of seven to ten
thousand feet, where it can get plenty of sunshine and snow and elbowroom
without encountering quick-growing overshadowing rivals. They never make
anything like a forest, seldom come together even in groves, but stand out
separate and independent in the wind, clinging by slight joints to the rock,
living chiefly on snow and thin air, and maintaining tough health on this
diet for two thousand years or more, every feature and gesture expressing
steadfast dogged endurance. The largest are usually about six or eight feet
in diameter, and fifteen or twenty in height. A very few are ten feet in
diameter, and on isolated moraine heaps forty to sixty feet in height. Many
are mere stumps, as broad as high, broken by avalanches and lightning,
picturesquely tufted with dense gray scalelike foliage, and giving no hint
of dying. The staminate flowers are like those of the libocedrus, but
smaller; the pistillate are inconspicuous. The wood is red, fine-grained,
and fragrant; the bark bright cinnamon and red, and in thrifty trees is
strikingly braided and reticulated, flaking off in thin lustrous ribbons,
which the Indians used to weave into matting and coarse cloth. These brown
unshakable pillars, standing solitary on polished pavements with bossy
masses of foliage in their arms, are exceedingly picturesque, and never fail
to catch the eye of the artist. They seem sole survivors of some ancient
race, wholly unacquainted with their neighbors.
I have spent a good deal of time, trying to
determine their age, but on account of dry rot which honeycombs most of the
old ones, I never got a complete count of the largest. Some are undoubtedly
more than two thousand years old; for though on good moraine soil they grow
about as fast as oaks, on bare pavements and smoothly glaciated overswept
granite ridges in the dome region they grow extremely slowly. One on the
Starr King ridge, only two feet eleven inches in diameter, was eleven
hundred and forty years old. Another on the same ridge, only one foot seven
and a half inches in diameter, had reached the age of eight hundred and
thirty-four years. The first fifteen inches from the bark of a medium-sized
tree - six feet in diameter - on the north Tenaya pavement had eight hundred
and fifty-nine layers of wood, or fifty- seven to the inch. Beyond this the
count was stopped by dry rot and scars of old wounds. The largest I examined
was thirty-three feet in girth, or nearly ten in diameter; and though I
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 to ten feet
thick standing on pavements are more than twenty centuries of age rather
than less. Barring accidents, for all I can see, they would live forever.
When killed, they waste out of existence about as slowly as granite. Even
when overthrown by avalanches, after standing so long, they refuse to lie at
rest, leaning stubbornly on their big elbows as if anxious to rise, and
while a single root holds to the rock putting forth fresh leaves with a grim
never-say-die and never-lie-down expression.
As the juniper is the most stubborn and
unshakable of trees, the mountain hemlock (Tsuga Mertensiana) is the most
graceful and pliant and sensitive, responding to the slightest touches of
the wind. Until it reaches a height of fifty or sixty feet it is sumptuously
clothed down to the ground with drooping branches, which are divided into
countless delicate waving sprays, grouped and arranged in most indescribably
beautiful ways, and profusely sprinkled with handsome brown cones. The
flowers also are peculiarly beautiful and effective: the pistillate very
dark rich purple; the staminate blue of so fine and pure a tone that the
best azure of the high 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 an
elevation of from nine thousand to ninety-five hundred feet, in hollows on
the northern slopes of mountains and ridges. But under all circumstances and
conditions of weather and soil, sheltered from the main currents of the
winds or in blank exposure to them, well fed or starved, it is always
singularly graceful in habit. Even at its highest limit in the park, ten
thousand five hundred feet above the sea on exposed ridgetops, where it
crouches and huddles close together in low thickets like those of the dwarf
pine, it still contrives to put forth its sprays and branches in forms of
irrepressible beauty, while on moist well-drained moraines it displays a
perfectly tropical luxuriance of foliage, flower, and fruit.
In the first winter storms the snow is
oftentimes soft, and lodges in the dense leafy branches, pressing them down
against the trunk, and the slender drooping axis bends lower and lower as
the load increases, until the top touches the ground and an ornamental arch
is made. Then, as storm succeeds storm and snow is heaped on snow, the whole
tree is at last buried, not again to see the light or move leaf or limb
until set free by the spring thaws in June or July. Not the young saplings
only 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 and forty feet
high. From April to May, when the snow is compacted, you may ride over the
prostrate groves without seeing a single branch or leaf of them. In the
autumn they are full of merry life, when Clark crows, squirrels, and
chipmunks are gathering the abundant crop of seeds while the deer rest
beneath the thick concealing branches. The finest grove in the park is near
Mount Conness, and the trail from the Tuolumne soda springs to the mountain
runs through it. Many of the trees in this grove are three to four or five
feet in diameter and about a hundred feet high.
The mountain hemlock 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 northmost Emit, so far
as I have observed, is in the icy fords of Prince William's Sound in
latitude 61°, where it forms pure forests at the level of the sea, growing
tall and majestic on the banks of the great glaciers, waving in accord with
the mountain winds and the thunder of the falling icebergs. Here as in the
Sierra it is ineffably beautiful, the very loveliest evergreen in America.
Of the round-headed dicotyledonous trees in the
park the most influential are the black and goldcup oaks. They occur in some
parts of the main forest belt, scattered among the big pines like a heavier
chaparral, but form extensive groves and reach perfect development only in
the Yosemite valleys and flats of the main caflons. The California black oak
(Quercus Californica) is one of the largest and most beautiful of the
Western oaks, attaining under favorable conditions a height of sixty to a
hundred feet, with a trunk three to seven feet in diameter, wide-spreading
picturesque branches, and smooth lively green foliage handsomely scalloped,
purple in the spring, yellow and red in autumn. It grows best in sunny open
groves on ground covered with ferns, chokecherry, brier rose, rubus, mints,
goldenrods, etc. Few, if any, of the famous oak groves of Europe, however
extensive, surpass these in the size and strength and bright, airy beauty of
the trees, the color and fragrance of the vegetation beneath them, the
quality of the light that fills their leafy arches, and in the grandeur of
the surrounding scenery. The finest grove in the park is in one of the
little Yosemite valleys of the Tuolumne Caņon, a few miles above
Hetch-Hetchy. The
mountain live-oak, or goldcup oak (Quercus chrysolepis), forms extensive
groves on earthquake and avalanche taluses and terraces in canons and
Yosemite valleys, from about three to five thousand feet above the sea. In
tough, sturdy, unwedgeable strength this is the oak of oaks. In general
appearance it resembles the great live-oak of the Southern states. It has
pale gray bark, a short, uneven, heavily buttressed trunk which usually
divides a few feet above the ground into strong wide-reaching limbs, forming
noble arches, and ending in an intricate maze of small branches and sprays,
the outer ones frequently drooping in long tresses to the ground like those
of the weeping willow, covered with small simple polished leaves, making a
canopy broad and bossy, on which the sunshine falls in glorious brightness.
The acorn cups are shallow, thick-walled, and covered with yellow fuzzy
dust. The flowers appear in May and June with a profusion of pollened
tresses, followed by the bronze-colored young leaves.
No tree in the park is a better measure of
altitude. In canons, at an elevation of four thousand feet, you may easily
find a tree six or eight feet in diameter; and at the head of a side caņon,
three thousand feet higher, up which you can climb in less than two hours,
you find the knotty giant dwarfed to a slender shrub, with leaves like those
of huckleberry bushes, still bearing acorns, and seemingly contented,
forming dense patches of chaparral, on the top of which you may make your
bed and sleep softly like a Highlander in heather. About a thousand feet
higher it is still smaller, making fringes about a foot high around boulders
and along seams in pavements and the brows of canons, giving hand-holds here
and there on cliffs hard to climb. The largest I have measured were from
twenty-five to twenty-seven feet in girth, fifty to sixty feet high, and the
spread of the limbs was about double the height.
The principal riverside trees
are poplar, alder, willow, broad-leaved maple, and Nuttall's flowering
dogwood. The poplar (Popnlus trichocarpa), often called balm of Gilead from
the gum on its buds, is a tall, stately tree, towering above its companions
and gracefully embowering the banks of the main streams at an elevation of
about four thousand feet. Its abundant foliage turns bright yellow in the
fall, and the Indian-summer sunshine sifts through it in delightful tones
over the slow- gliding waters when they are at their lowest ebb.
The flowering dogwood is brighter still in these
brooding days, for every branch of its broad head is then a brilliant
crimson flame. In the spring, when the streams are in flood, it is the
whitest of trees, white as a snow bank with its magnificent flowers four to
eight inches in width, making a wonderful show, and drawing swarms of moths
and butterflies. The
broad-leaved maple is usually found in the coolest boulder-choked canons,
where the streams are gray and white with foam, over which it spreads its
branches in beautiful arches from bank to bank, forming leafy tunnels full
of soft green light and spray, - favorite homes of the water-ouzel. Around
the glacier lakes, two or three thousand feet higher, the common aspen grows
in fringing lines and groves which are brilliantly colored in autumn,
reminding you of the color glory of the Eastern woods.
Scattered here and there or in groves the
botanist will find a few other trees, mostly small, - the mountain mahogany,
cherry, chestnut-oak, laurel, and nutmeg. The California nutmeg (Tumion
Californicum) is a handsome evergreen, belonging to the yew family, with
pale bark, prickly leaves, fruit like a green-gage plum, and seed like a
nutmeg. One of the best groves of it in the park is at the Cascades below
Yosemite. But the noble
oaks and all these rock-shading, stream-embowering trees are as nothing amid
the vast abounding billowy forests of conifers. During my first years in the
Sierra I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I
found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and
felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble
mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.
He seemed as serene as a sequoia, his head in the empyrean; and forgetting
his age, plans, duties, ties of every sort, I proposed an immeasurable
camping trip back in the heart of the mountains.
He seemed anxious to go, but considerately
mentioned his party. I said: "Never mind. The mountains are calling; run
away, and let plans and parties and dragging lowland duties all 'gang
tapsal-teerie.' We'll go up a caņon singing your own song, 'Good-by, proud
world! I'm going home,' in divine earnest. Up there lies a new heaven and a
new earth; let us go to the show." But alas, it was too late, - too near the
sundown of his life. The shadows were growing long, and he leaned on his
friends. His party, full of indoor philosophy, failed to see the natural
beauty and fullness of promise of my wild plan, and laughed at it in
good-natured ignorance, as if it were necessarily amusing to imagine that
Boston people might be led to accept Sierra manifestations of God at the
price of rough camping. Anyhow, they would have none of it, and held Mr.
Emerson to the hotels and trails.
After spending only five tourist days in
Yosemite he was led away, but I saw him two days more; for I was kindly
invited to go with the party as far as the Mariposa big trees. I told Mr.
Emerson that I would gladly go to the sequoias with him, if he would camp in
the grove. He consented heartily, and I felt sure that we would have at
least one good wild memorable night around a sequoia camp-fire. Next day we
rode through the magnificent forests of the Merced basin, and I kept calling
his attention to the sugar pines, quoting his wood-notes, "Come listen what
the pine tree saith," etc., pointing out the noblest as kings and high
priests, the most eloquent and commanding preachers of all the mountain
forests, stretching forth their century-old arms in benediction over the
worshiping congregations crowded about them. He gazed in devout admiration,
saying but little, while his fine smile faded away.
Early in the afternoon, when we reached Clark's
Station, I was surprised to see the party dismount. And when I asked if we
were not going up into the grove to camp they said: "No; it would never do
to lie out in the night air. Mr. Emerson might take cold; and you know, Mr.
Muir, that would be a dreadful thing." In vain I urged, that only in homes
and hotels were colds caught, that nobody ever was known to take cold
camping in these woods, that there was not a single cough or sneeze in all
the Sierra. Then I pictured the big climate-changing, inspiring fire I would
make, praised the beauty and fragrance of sequoia flame, told how the great
trees would stand about us transfigured in the purple light, while the stars
looked down between the great domes; ending by urging them to come on and
make an immortal Emerson night of it. But the house habit was not to be
overcome, nor the strange dread of pure night air, though it is only cooled
day air with a little dew in it. So the carpet dust and unknowable reeks
were preferred. And to think of this being a Boston choice! Sad commentary
on culture and the glorious transcendentalism.
Accustomed to reach whatever place I started
for, I was going up the mountain alone to camp, and wait the coming of the
party next day. But since Emerson was so soon to vanish, I concluded to stop
with him. He hardly spoke a word all the evening, yet it was a great
pleasure simply to be near him, warming in the light of his face as at a
fire. In the morning we rode up the trail through a noble forest of pine and
fir into the famous Mariposa Grove, and stayed an hour or two, mostly in
ordinary tourist fashion, - looking at the biggest giants, measuring them
with a tape line, riding through prostrate fire-bored trunks, etc., though
Mr. Emerson was alone occasionally, sauntering about as if under a spell. As
we walked through a fine group, he quoted, "There were giants in those
days," recognizing the antiquity of the race. To commemorate his visit, Mr.
Galen Clark, the guardian of the grove, selected the finest of the unnamed
trees and requested him to give it a name. He named it Samoset, after the
New England sachem, as the best that occurred to him.
The poor bit of measured time was soon spent,
and while the saddles were being adjusted I again urged Emerson to stay.
"You are yourself a sequoia," I said. "Stop and get acquainted with your big
brethren." But he was past his prime, and was now as a child in the hands of
his affectionate but sadly civilized friends, who seemed as full of
old-fashioned conformity as of bold intellectual independence. It was the
afternoon of the day and the afternoon of his life, and his course was now
westward down all the mountains into the sunset. The party mounted and rode
away in wondrous contentment, apparently, tracing the trail through
ceanothus and dogwood bushes, around the bases of the big trees, up the
slope of the sequoia basin, and over the divide. I followed to the edge of
the grove. Emerson lingered in the rear of the train, and when he reached
the top of the ridge, after all the rest of the party were over and out of
sight, he turned his horse, took off his hat and waved me a last good-bye. I
felt lonely, so sure had I been that Emerson of all men would be the
quickest to see the mountains and sing them. Gazing awhile on the spot where
he vanished, I sauntered back into the heart of the grove, made a bed of
sequoia plumes and ferns by the side of a stream, gathered a store of
firewood, and then walked about until sundown. The birds, robins, thrushes,
warblers, etc., that had kept out of sight, came about me, now that all was
quiet, and made cheer. After sundown I built a great fire, and as usual had
it all to myself. And though lonesome for the first time in these forests, I
quickly took heart again, - the trees had not gone to Boston, nor the birds;
and as I sat by the fire, Emerson was still with me in spirit, though I
never again saw him in the flesh. lie sent books and wrote, cheering me on;
advised me not to stay too long in solitude. Soon he hoped that my guardian
angel would intimate that my probation was at a close. Then I was to roll up
my herbariums, sketches, and poems (though I never knew I had any poems),
and come to his house; and when I tired of him and his humble surroundings,
he would show me to better people.
But there remained many a forest to wander
through, many a mountain and glacier to cross, before I was to see his
Wachusett and Monadnock, Boston and Concord. It was seventeen years after we
had parted on the Wawona ridge that I stood beside his grave under a pine
tree on the hill above Sleepy Hollow. He had gone to higher Sierras, and, as
I fancied, was again waving his hand in friendly recognition. |
