Our National Parks - Chapters III-IV



CHAPTER III
THE YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK

Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the 
best. Though extremely rugged, with its main features on the grandest 
scale in height and depth, it is nevertheless easy of access and 
hospitable; and its marvelous beauty, displayed in striking and alluring 
forms, wooes the admiring wanderer on and on, higher and higher, charmed 
and enchanted. Benevolent, solemn, fateful, pervaded with divine light, 
every landscape glows like a countenance hallowed in eternal repose; and 
every one of its living creatures, clad in flesh and leaves, and every 
crystal of its rocks, whether on the surface shining in the sun or buries 
miles deep in what we call darkness, is throbbing and pulsing with the 
heartbeats of God. All the world lies warm in one heart, yet the Sierra 
seems to get more light than other mountains. The weather is mostly 
sunshine embellished with magnificent storms, and nearly everything shines 
from base to summit,--the rocks, streams, lakes, glaciers, irised falls, 
and the forests of silver fir 

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and silver pine. And how bright is the shining after summer showers and 
dewy nights, and after frosty nights in spring and autumn, when the 
morning sunbeams are pouring through the crystals on the bushes and grass, 
and in winter through the snow-laden trees!

The average cloudiness for the whole year is perhaps less than ten 
hundredths. Scarcely a day of all the summer is dark, though there is no 
lack of magnificent thundering cumuli. They rise in the warm midday hours, 
mostly over the middle region, in June and July, like new mountain ranges, 
higher Sierras, mightily augmenting the grandeur of the scenery while 
giving rain to the forests and gardens and bringing forth their fragrance. 
The wonderful weather and beauty inspire everybody to be up and doing. 
Every summer day is a workday to be confidently counted on, the short 
dashes of rain forming, not interruptions, but rests. The big blessed 
storm days of winter, when the whole range stands white, are not a whit 
less inspiring and kind. Well may the Sierra be called the Range of Light, 
not the Snowy Range; for only in winter is it white; while all the year it 
is bright.

Of this glorious range the Yosemite National Park is a central section, 
thirty-six miles in length and forty-eight miles in breadth. The famous 
Yosemite Valley lies in the heart of it, and it includes the head waters 
of the Tuolumne 

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and Merced rivers, two of the most songful streams in the world; 
innumerable lakes and waterfalls and smooth silky lawns; the noblest 
forests, the loftiest granite domes, the deepest ice-sculptured canñons, 
the brightest crystalline pavements, and snowy mountains soaring into the 
sky twelve and thirteen thousand feet, arrayed in open ranks and spiry 
pinnacled groups partially separated by tremendous cañons and 
amphitheatres; gardens on their sunny brows avalanches thundering down 
their long white slopes, cataracts roaring gray and foaming in the crooked 
rugged gorges. and glaciers in their shadowy recesses working in silence, 
slowly completing their sculpture; new-born lakes at their feet, blue and 
green, free or encumbered with drifting icebergs like miniature Arctic 
Oceans, shining, sparkling, calm as stars.

Nowhere will you see the majestic operations of nature more clearly 
revealed beside the frailest, most gentle and peaceful things. Nearly all 
the park is a profound solitude. Yet it is full of charming company, full 
of God's thoughts, a place of peace and safety amid the most exalted 
grandeur and eager enthusiastic action, a new song, a place of beginnings 
abounding in first lessons on life, mountain-building, eternal, 
invincible, unbreakable order; with sermons in stones, storms, trees, 
flowers, and animals brimful of humanity. During the last glacial period, 
just 

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past, the former features of the range were rubbed off as a chalk sketch 
from a blackboard, and a new beginning was made. Hence the wonderful 
clearness and freshness of the rocky pages.

But to get all this into words is a hopeless task. The leanest sketch of 
each feature would need a whole chapter. Nor would any amount of space, 
however industriously scribbled, be of much avail. To defrauded town 
toilers,parks in magazine articles are like pictures of bread to the 
hungry. I can write only hints to incite good wanderers to come to the 
feast.

While this glorious park embraces big, generous samples of the very best 
of the Sierra treasure, it is, fortunately, at the same time, the most 
accessible portion. It lies opposite San Francisco, at a distance of about 
one hundred and forty miles. Railroads connected with all the continent 
reach into the foothills, and three good carriage roads, from Big Oak 
Flat, Coulterville, and Raymond, run into Yosemite Valley. Another, called 
the Tioga road, runs from Crocker's Station on the Yosemite Big Oak Flat 
road near the Tuolumne Big Tree Grove, right across the park to the summit 
of the range by way of Lake Tenaya, the Big Tuolumne Meadows, and Mount 
Dana. These roads, with many trials that radiate from Yosemite Valley, 
bring most of the park within reach of everybody, well or half well.

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The three main natural divisions of the park, the lower, middle, and 
alpine regions, are fairly well defined in altitude, topographical 
features, and vegetation. The lower, with an average elevation of about 
five thousand feet, is the region of the great forests, made up of sugar 
pine, the largest and most beautiful of all the pines in the world; the 
silvery yellow pine, the next in rank; Douglas spruce, libocedrus, the 
white and red silver firs, and the Sequoia gigantea, or "big tree," the 
king of conifers, the noblest of a noble race. On warm slopes next the 
foothills there are a few Sabine nut pines; oaks make beautiful groves in 
the cañon valleys; and poplar, alder, maple, laurel, and Nuttall's 
flowering dogwood shade the banks of the streams. Many of the pines are 
more than two hundred feet high, but they are not crowded together. The 
sunbeams streaming through their feathery arches brighten the ground, and 
you walk beneath the radiant ceiling in devout subdued mood, as if you 
were in a grand cathedral with mellow light sifting through colored 
windows, while the flowery pillared aisles open enchanting vistas in every 
direction. Scarcely a peak or ridge in the whole region rises bare above 
the forests, though they are thinly planted in some places where the soil 
is shallow. From the cool breezy heights you look abroad over a boundless 
waving sea of evergreens, covering 

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hill and ridge and smooth-flowing slope as far as the eye can reach, and 
filling every hollow and down-plunging ravine in glorious triumphant 
exuberance.

Perhaps the best general view of the pine forests of the park, and one of 
the best in the range, is obtained from the top of the Merced and Tuolumne 
divide near Hazel Green. On the long, smooth, finely folded slopes of the 
main ridge, at a height of five to six thousand feet above the sea, they 
reach most perfect development and are marshaled to view in magnificent 
towering ranks, their colossal spires and domes and broad palmlike crowns, 
deep in the kind sky, rising above one another,--a multitude of giants in 
perfect health and beauty,--sun-fed mountaineers rejoicing in their 
strength, chanting with the winds, in accord with the falling waters. The 
ground is mostly open and inviting to walkers. The fragrant chamæbatia is 
outspread in rich carpets miles in extent; the manzanita, in orchard-like 
groves, covered with pink bell-shaped flowers in the spring, grows in 
openings facing the sun, hazel and buckthorn in the dells; warm brows are 
purple with mint, yellow with sunflowers and violets; and tall lilies ring 
their bells around the borders of meadows and along the ferny, mossy banks 
of the streams. Never was mountain forest more lavishly furnished.

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Hazel Green is a good place quietly to camp and study, to get acquainted 
with the trees and birds, to drink the reviving water and weather, and to 
watch the changing lights of the big charmed days. The rose light of the 
dawn, creeping higher among the stars, changes to daffodil yellow; then 
come the level enthusiastic sunbeams pouring across the feathery ridges, 
touching pine after pine, spruce and fir, libocedrus and lordly sequoia, 
searching every recess, until all are awakened and warmed. In the white 
noon they shine in silvery splendor, every needle and cell in bole and 
branch thrilling and tingling with ardent life; and the whole landscape 
glows with consciousness, like the face of a god. The hours go by 
uncounted. The evening flames with purple and gold. The breeze that has 
been blowing from the lowlands dies away, and far and near the mighty host 
of trees baptized in the purple flood stand hushed and thoughtful, 
awaiting the sun's blessing and farewell,--as impressive a ceremony as if 
it were never to rise again. When the daylight fades, the night breeze 
from the snowy summits begins to blow, and the trees, waving and rustling 
beneath the stars, breathe free again.

It is hard to leave such camps and woods; nevertheless, to the large 
majority of travelers the middle region of the park is still more 
interesting, for it has the most striking features of 

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all the Sierra scenery,--the deepest sections of the famous cañons, of 
which the Yosemite Valley, Hetch-Hetchy Valley, and many smaller ones are 
wider portions, with level parklike floors and walls of immense height and 
grandeur of sculpture. This middle region holds also the greater number of 
the beautiful glacier lakes and glacier meadows, the great granite domes, 
and the most brilliant and most extensive of the glacier pavements. And 
though in large part it is severely rocky and bare, it is still rich in 
trees. The magnificent silver fir (Abies magnifica), which ranks with the 
giants, forms a continuous belt across the park above the pines at an 
elevation of from seven to nine thousand feet, and north and south of the 
park boundaries to the extremities of the range, only slightly interrupted 
by the main cañons. The two-leaved or tamarack pine makes another less 
regular belt along the upper margin of the region, while between these two 
belts, and mingling with them, in groves or scattered, are the mountain 
hemlock, the most graceful of evergreens; the noble mountain pine; the 
Jeffrey form of the yellow pine, with big cones and long needles; and the 
brown, burly, sturdy Western juniper. All these, except the juniper, which 
grows on bald rocks, have plenty of flowery brush about them, and gardens 
in open spaces.

Here, too, lies the broad, shining heavily 

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sculptured region of primeval granite, which best tells the story of the 
glacial period on the Pacific side of the continent. No other mountain 
chain on the globe, as far as I know, is so rich as the Sierra in bold, 
striking, well-preserved glacial monuments, easily understood by anybody 
capable of patient observation. Every feature is more or less glacial, and 
this park portion of the range is the brightest and clearest of all. Not a 
peak, ridge, dome, cañnon, lake basin, garden, forest, or stream but in 
some way explains the past existence and modes of action of flowing, 
grinding, sculpturing, soil-making, scenery-making ice. For, 
notwithstanding the post-glacial agents--air, rain, frost, rivers, 
earthquakes, avalanches--have been at work upon the greater part of the 
range for tens of thousands of stormy years, engraving their own 
characters over those of the ice, the latter are so heavily emphasized and 
enduring they still rise in sublime relief, clear and legible through 
every after inscription. The streams have traced only shallow wrinkles as 
yet, and avalanche, wind, rain, and melting snow have made blurs and 
scars, but the change effected on the face of the landscape is not greater 
than is made on the face of a mountaineer by a single year of weathering.

Of all the glacial phenomena presented here, the most striking and 
attractive to travelers are the polished pavements, because they are so 

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beautiful, and their beauty is of so rare a kind,--unlike any part of the 
loose earthy lowlands where people dwell and earn their bread. They are 
simply flat or gently undulating areas of solid resisting granite, the 
unchanged surface over which the ancient glaciers flowed. They are found 
in the most perfect condition at an elevation of from eight to nine 
thousand feet above sea level. Some are miles in extent, only slightly 
blurred or scarred by spots that have at last yielded to the weather; 
while the best preserved portions are brilliantly polished, and reflect 
the sunbeams as calm water or glass, shining as if rubbed and burnished 
every day, notwithstanding they have been exposed to plashing, corroding 
rains, dew, frost, and melting sloppy snows for thousands of years.

The attention of hunters and prospectors, who see so much in their wild 
journeys, is seldom attracted by moraines, however regular and artificial-
looking; or rocks, however boldly sculptured; or cañons, however deep and 
sheer-walled. But when they come to these pavements, they go down on their 
knees and rub their hands admiringly on the glistening surface, and try 
hard to account for its mysterious smoothness and brightness. They may 
have seen the winter avalanches come down the mountains, through the 
woods, sweeping away the trees and scouring the ground; but they conclude 
that this 

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cannot be the work of avalanches, because the striæ show that the agent, 
whatever it was, flowed along the around and over the top of high ridges 
and domes, and also filled the deep cañons. Neither can they see how water 
could be the agent, for the strange polish is found thousands of feet 
above the reach of any conceivable flood. Only the winds seem capable of 
moving over the face of the country in the directions indicated by the 
lines and grooves.

The pavements are particularly fine around Lake Tenaya, and have suggested 
the Indian name Py-we-ack, the Lake of the Shining Rocks. Indians seldom 
trouble themselves with geological questions, but a Mono Indian once came 
to me and asked if I could tell him what made the rocks so smooth at 
Tenaya. Even dogs and horses, on their first journeys into this region, 
study geology to the extent of gazing wonderingly at the strange 
brightness of the ground, and pawing it and smelling it, as if afraid of 
falling or sinking.

In the production of this admirable hard finish, the glaciers in many 
places exerted a pressure of more than a hundred tons to the square foot, 
planing down granite, slate, and quartz alike, showing their structure, 
and making beautiful mosaics where large feldspar crystals form the 
greater part of the rock. On such pavements the sunshine is at times 
dazzling, as if the surface were of burnished silver.

[image caption: PAVEMENT OF BASALTIC COLUMNS WORN BY GLACIAL ACTION, 
YOSEMITE]

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Here, also, are the brightest of the Sierra landscapes in general. The 
regions lying at the same elevation to the north and south were perhaps 
subjected to as long and intense a glaciation; but because the rocks are 
less resisting, their polished surfaces have mostly given way to the 
weather, leaving here and there only small imperfect patches on the most 
enduring portions of cañon walls protected from the action of rain and 
snow, and on hard bosses kept comparatively dry by boulders. The short, 
steeply inclined canñons of the east flank of the range are in some places 
brightly polished, but they are far less magnificent than those of the 
broad west flank.

One of the best general views of the middle region of the park is to be 
had from the top of a majestic dome which long ago I named the Glacier 
Monument. It is situated a few miles to the north of Cathedral Peak, and 
rises to a height of about fifteen hundred feet above its base and ten 
thousand above the sea. At first sight it seems sternly inaccessible, but 
a good climber will find that it may be scaled on the south side. 
Approaching it from this side you pass through a dense bryanthus-fringed 
grove of mountain hemlock, catching glimpses now and then of the colossal 
dome towering to an immense height above the dark evergreens; and when at 
last you have made your way across woods, wading through azalea and ledum 
thickets, you step abruptly out of the tree shadows and mossy 

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leafy softness upon a bare porphyry pavement, and behold the dome unveiled 
in all its grandeur. Fancy a nicely proportioned monument, eight or ten 
feet high, hewn from one stone, standing in a pleasure ground; magnify it 
to a height of fifteen hundred feet, retaining its simplicity of form and 
fineness, and cover its surface with crystals; then you may gain an idea 
of the sublimity and beauty of this ice-burnished dome, one of many 
adorning this wonderful park.

In making the ascent, one finds that the curve of the base rapidly 
steepens, until one is in danger of slipping; but feldspar crystals, two 
or three inches long, that have been weathered into relief, afford slight 
footholds. The summit is in part burnished, like the sides and base, the 
striæ and scratches indicating that the mighty Tuolumne Glacier, two or 
three thousand feet deep, overwhelmed it while it stood firm like a 
boulder at the bottom of a river. The pressure it withstood must have been 
enormous. Had it been less solidly built, it would have been ground and 
crushed into moraine fragments, like the general mass of the mountain 
flank in which at first it lay imbedded; for it is only a hard residual 
knob or knot with a concentric structure of superior strength, brought 
into relief by the removal of the less resisting rock about it,--an 
illustration in stone of the survival of the strongest and most favorably 
situated.

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Hardly less wonderful, when we contemplate the storms it has encountered 
since first it saw the light, is its present unwasted condition. The whole 
quantity of postglacial wear and tear it has suffered has not diminished 
its stature a single inch, as may be readily shown by measuring from the 
level of the unchanged polished portions of the surface. Indeed, the 
average postglacial denudation of the entire region, measured in the same 
way, is found to be less than two inches,--a mighty contrast to that of 
the ice; for the glacial denudation here has been not less than a mile; 
that is, in developing the present landscapes, an amount of rock a mile in 
average thickness has been silently carried away by flowing ice during the 
last glacial period.

A few erratic boulders nicely poised on the founded summit of the monument 
tell an interesting story. They came from a mountain on the crest of the 
range, about twelve miles to the eastward, floating like chips on the 
frozen sea, and were stranded here when the top of the monument emerged to 
the light of day, while the companions of these boulders, whose positions 
chanced to be over the slopes where they could not find rest, were carried 
farther on by the shallowing current.

The general view from the summit consists of a sublime assemblage of 
iceborn mountains and rocks and long wavering ridges, lakes and 

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streams and meadows, moraines in wide-sweeping belts, and beds covered and 
dotted with forests and groves,--hundreds of square miles of them composed 
in wild harmony. The snowy mountains on the axis of the range, mostly 
sharp-peaked and crested, rise in a noble array along the sky to the 
eastward and northward; the gray-pillared Hoffman spur and the Yosemite 
domes and a countless number of others to the westward; Cathedral Peak 
with its many spires and companion peaks and domes to the southward; and a 
smooth billowy multitude of rocks, from fifty feet or less to a thousand 
feet high, which from their peculiar form seem to be rolling on westward, 
fill most of the middle ground. Immediately beneath you are the Big 
Tuolumne Meadows, with an ample swath of dark pine woods on either side, 
enlivened by the young river, that is seen sparkling and shimmering as it 
sways from side to side, tracing as best it can its broad glacial channel.

The ancient Tuolumne Glacier, lavishly flooded by many a noble affluent 
from the snow-laden flanks of Mounts Dana, Gibbs, Lyell, Maclure, and 
others nameless as yet, poured its majestic overflowing current, four or 
five miles wide, directly against the high outstanding mass of Mount 
Hoffman, which divided and deflected it right and left, just as a river is 
divided against an island that stands in the middle of its channel. 

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Two distinct glaciers were thus formed, one of which flowed through the 
Big Tuolumne Cañon and Hetch Hetchy Valley, while the other swept upward 
five hundred feet in a broad current across the divide between the basins 
of the Tuolumne and Merced into the Tenaya basin, and thence down through 
the Tenaya Cañon and Yosemite Valley.

The maplike distinctness and freshness of this glacial landscape cannot 
fail to excite the attention of every observer, no matter how little of 
its scientific significance he may at first recognize. These bald, glossy, 
westward-leaning rocks in the open middle ground, with their rounded backs 
and shoulders toward the glacier fountains of the summit mountains and 
their split angular fronts looking in the opposite direction, every one of 
them displaying the form of greatest strength with reference to physical 
structure and glacial action, show the tremendous force with which through 
unnumbered centuries the ice flood swept over them, and also the direction 
of the flow; while the mountains, with their sharp summits and abraded 
sides, indicate the height to which the glacier rose; and the moraines, 
curving and swaying in beautiful lines, mark the boundaries of the main 
trunk and its tributaries as they existed toward the close of the glacial 
winter. None of the commercial highways of the sea or land, marked with 
buoys and lamps, 

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fences and guideboards, is so unmistakably indicated as are these channels 
of the vanished Tuolumne glaciers.

The action of flowing ice, whether in the form of river-like glaciers or 
broad mantling folds, is but little understood as compared with that of 
other sculpturing agents. Rivers work openly where people dwell, and so do 
the rain, and the sea thundering on all the shores of the world; and the 
universal ocean of air, through unseen, speaks aloud in a thousand voices 
and explains its modes of working and its power. But glaciers, back in 
their cold solitudes, work apart from men, exerting their tremendous 
energies in silence and darkness. Coming in vapor from the sea, flying 
invisible on the wind, descending in snow, changing to ice, white, 
spiritlike, they brood outspread over the predestined landscapes, working 
on unwearied through unmeasured ages, until in the fullness of time the 
mountains and valleys are brought forth, channels furrowed for the rivers, 
basins made for meadows and lakes, and soil beds spread for the forests 
and fields that man and beast may be fed. Then vanishing like clouds, they 
melt into streams and go singing back home to the sea.

To an observer upon this adamantine old monument in the midst of such 
scenery, getting glimpses of the thoughts of God, the day seems endless, 
the sun stands still. Much faithless fuss 

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is made over the passage in the Bible telling of the standing still of the 
sun for Joshua. Here you may learn that the miracle occurs for every 
devout mountaineer, for everybody doing anything worth doing, seeing 
anything worth seeing. One day is as a thousand years, a thousand years as 
one day, and while yet in the flesh you enjoy immortality.

From the monument you will find an easy way down through the woods and 
along the Big Tuolumne Meadows to Mount Dana, the summit of which commands 
a grand telling view of the alpine region. The scenery all the way is 
inspiring, and you saunter on without knowing that you are climbing. The 
spacious sunny meadows, through the midst of which the bright river 
glides, extend with but little interruption ten miles to the eastward, 
dark woods rising on either side to the limit of tree growth, and above 
the woods a picturesque line of gray peaks and spires dotted with snow 
banks; while, on the axis of the Sierra, Mount Dana and his noble compeers 
repose in massive sublimity, their vast size and simple flowing contours 
contrasting in the most striking manner with the clustering spires and 
thin-pinnacled crests crisply outlined on the horizon to the north and 
south of them.

Tracing the silky lawns, gradually ascending, gazing at the sublime 
scenery more and more openly unfolded, noting the avalanche gaps in 

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the upper forests, lingering over beds of blue gentians and purple-
flowered bryanthus and cassiope, and dwarf willows an inch high in close-
felted gray carpets, brightened here and there with kalmia and soft 
creeping mats of vaccinium sprinkled with pink bells that seem to have 
been showered down from the sky like hail,--thus beguiled and enchanted, 
you reach the base of the mountain wholly unconscious of the miles you 
have walked. And so on to the summit. For all the way up the long red 
slate slopes, that in the distance seemed barren, you find little garden 
beds and tufts of dwarf phlox, ivesia, and blue arctic daisies that go 
straight to your heart, blessed fellow mountaineers kept safe and warm by 
a thousand miracles. You are now more than thirteen thousand feet above 
the sea, and to the north and south you behold a sublime wilderness of 
mountains in glorious array, their snowy summits towering together in 
crowded, bewildering abundance, shoulder to shoulder, peak beyond peak. To 
the east lies the Great Basin, barren-looking and silent, apparently a 
land of pure desolation, rich only in beautiful light. Mono Lake, fourteen 
miles long, is outspread below you at a depth of nearly seven thousand 
feet, its shores of volcanic ashes and sand, treeless and sunburned; a 
group of volcanic cones, with well-formed, unwasted craters rises to the 
south of the lake; while up from its eastern shore innumerable 

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mountains with soft flowing outlines extend range beyond range, gray, and 
pale purple, and blue,--the farthest gradually fading on the flowing 
horizon. Westward you look down and over the countless moraines, glacier 
meadows, and grand sea of domes and rock waves of the upper Tuolumne 
basin, the Cathedral and Hoffman mountains with their wavering lines and 
zones of forest, the wonderful region to the north of the Tuolumne Cañon, 
and across the dark belt of silver firs to the pale mountains of the coast.

In the icy fountains of the Mount Lyell and Ritter groups of peaks, to the 
south of Dana, three of the most important of the Sierra rivers--the 
Tuolumne, Merced, and San Joaquin-- take their rise, their highest 
tributaries being within a few miles of one another as they rush forth on 
their adventurous courses from beneath snow banks and glaciers.

Of the small shrinking glaciers of the Sierra, remnants of the majestic 
system that sculptured the range, I have seen sixty-five. About twenty-
five of them are in the park, and eight are in sight from Mount Dana.

The glacier lakes are sprinkled over all the alpine and subalpine regions, 
gleaming like eyes beneath heavy rock brows, tree-fringed or bare, 
embosomed in the woods, or lying in open basins with green and purple 
meadows around them; but the greater number are in the cool shadowy 

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hollows of the summit mountains not far from the glaciers, the highest 
lying at an elevation of from eleven to nearly twelve thousand feet above 
the sea. The whole number in the Sierra, not counting the smallest, can 
hardly be less than fifteen hundred, of which about two hundred and fifty 
are in the park. From one standpoint, on Red Mountain, I counted forty-
two, most of them within a radius of ten miles. The glacier meadows, which 
are spread over the filled-up basins of vanished lakes and form one of the 
most charming features of the scenery, are still more numerous than the 
lakes.

An observer stationed here, in the glacial period, would have overlooked a 
wrinkled mantle of ice as continuous as that which now covers the 
continent of Greenland; and of all the vast landscape now shining in the 
sun, he would have seen only the tops of the summit peaks, rising darkly 
like storm-beaten islands, lifeless and hopeless, above rock-encumbered 
ice waves. If among the agents that nature has employed in making these 
mountains there be one that above all other deserves the name of 
Destroyer, it is the glacier. But we quickly learn that destruction is 
creation. During the dreary centuries through which the Sierra lay in 
darkness, crushed beneath the ice folds of the glacial winter, there was a 
steady invincible advance toward the warm life and beauty of to-day; and 
it is 

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just where the glaciers crushed most destructively that the greatest 
amount of beauty is made manifest. But as these landscapes have succeeded 
the preglacial landscapes, so they in turn are giving place to others 
already planned and foreseen. The granite domes and pavements, apparently 
imperishable, we take as symbols of permanence, while these crumbling 
peaks, down whose frosty gullies avalanches are ever falling, are symbols 
of change and decay. Yet all alike, fast or slow, are surely vanishing 
away.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, 
keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in 
rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful 
form into another.



CHAPTER IV
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, 

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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, 

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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 

[image caption: TIMBER LINE AT THOUSAND ISLET LAKE, NEAR MT. RITTER, 
YOSEMITE]

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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 

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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, 

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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 

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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.

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 

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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 

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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 

Page 107

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 

Page 108

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 

Page 109

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 

Page 110

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 

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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 

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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 

Page 113

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.

Both the yellow and sugar pines grow rapidly on good soil where they are 
not crowded. At 

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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.

Page 115

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.

Page 116

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 

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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, 

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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 

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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.

Page 120

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 

Page 121

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 

Page 122

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 on 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 

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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 

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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 not 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 

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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 estimate blue of so 

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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 

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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 are 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.

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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 

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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.

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 

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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 

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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 
reach 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 

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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 

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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 

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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, ridding 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.

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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 

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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.