The Forests of the Yosemite Park
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 cañons. 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 millmen, 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 comers, 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 Cañon, the
latter on the walls of Hetch-Hetchy Valley and in the cañon below it.
[Illustration: California Cones.]
The nut-pine (_Pinus monophylla_) is a small, hardy, contended-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 Basins. 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 timber-line, 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 branchlets. 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 flat, 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 branchlets, 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
branchlets, 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 branchlets 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, standing 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 flexilis.
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 covers
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 branchlets, 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 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
branchlets 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.
[Illustration: Yellow Pine (Yosemite Valley Form).]
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
branchlets. 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 branchlets.
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, deflexa,
Apacheca latifolia, etc. But in all its wanderings, in every form, it
manifests noble strength. Clad in thick bark like a warrior 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 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 cañons, 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 giant.
The incense cedar (_Libocedrus decurrens_), 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 vitæ. It is distributed through the main
forest from an elevation of three to six thousand feet, and in
sheltered portions of cañons 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 branchlets 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 branchlets 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 expecting 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 a 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 purplewinged 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 contorta, var.
Murrayana, 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
streamsides 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
wide-spread 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 Mountains, 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 elbow-room 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 nine thousand 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, then 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 limit, so
far as I have observed, is in the icy fiords 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 cañons. 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 Cañon, 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
cañons 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 dark, 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.
[Illustration: A California Life-Oak.]
No tree in the park is a better measure of altitude. In cañons, 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 cañon, 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
cañons, 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 (_Populus
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
cañons, 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 ousel. 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 cañon 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-by. 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. He 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 our parting 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.