All along the coast mountains from Oregon to Lower California, a
five-leaved soft pine grows whose size makes our Eastern white pine seem
like a dwarf. In that far country of big trees, it is one of the giants.
I had read of these trees which grow to be over 200 feet in height, with
trunks six to ten feet in diameter at the ground, but figures do not give
much idea of the truth. I first saw the groves of sugar pines miles ahead
of us, as the stage climbed the foot hills of the Sierra Nevada
mountains. We were on the way into the wonderful Yosemite Valley. The
scrawny, grey, digger pines, with cones as big as a man’s head, grew on
the lower foot hills. Next came the great yellow pines, and still higher
up, the grand sugar pines, along the highest level of the stage road.
They stood oftenest in close ranks so that their tops were small, because
of the crowding. And here they had stood for centuries. The road was no
wider than the broad stumps of some that had been cut down, and their
prostrate trunks were longer than any log I have ever seen before. I
remember calculating that the round dining table at home could be set
upon this stump, and all the family seated round it with no danger of
their chairs being too near the edge. The standing trunks seemed like
great builded columns, too large for real trees to grow. Their feathery,
dark green tips reached nearer to the sky than any trees in Eastern
forests.
[Illustration: Hemlock cones are small; those of Norway spruce are four
or five inches long]
[Illustration: Pine twig with cones, young and old, and clustered
staminate flowers]
Under these pines old cones were lying. They were big, to match the
trees. Twenty inches the longest one measured, with scales two inches
long, and plump seeds as big as navy beans. Far off in the tree top the
hanging cones looked moderate in size. We could just see the green,
half-grown cones nearer the ends of the branches, for this Western white
pine, like our Eastern species, requires two years to mature its fruit.
“Why call them sugar pines?” I asked the stage driver. He pointed to some
drops of resin-like substance on the scales of the cone I held in my lap.
“Taste it,” he said. I did, and it was sweet, with somewhat the flavour
of maple sugar. Crystals of this sugar come from wounds in the bark, and
from the ends of green sticks when burning. The sap is quite as sweet as
that of maple trees, but one is soon surfeited in eating the candy-like
substance.
The stage driver told me that a lumberman could cut $5,000 worth of
lumber from one of these sugar pine trees. No wonder they think that it
is a burning shame for the government to reserve these noble woods of the
Yosemite tract “just to be looked at.” Fortunately for us, and for the
people of the whole country, some thousands of acres of magnificent
forest are reserved on those Western-mountain slopes, where they are safe
from the lumberman’s axe. If we cannot go to see them this year, perhaps
we can fifty years hence. They will still be standing, still growing,
these noble remnants of the grandest forests of any country. Specimens of
what Mr. John Muir calls “the largest, noblest, and most beautiful of all
the seventy or eighty species of pine trees in the world.”
[Illustration: Thousands of little balsam firs supply the market with
Christmas trees]
[Illustration: In these tall white pine trees Nathaniel Hawthorne built
an out-door study, where he wrote undisturbed]