The Yosemite eBook

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