gly Sugar Pine, towering aloft to a
height of more than two hundred feet, offers a fine mark to storm-winds;
but it is not densely foliaged, and its long horizontal arms swing round
compliantly in the blast, like tresses of green, fluent algae in a
brook: while the Silver Firs in most places keep their ranks well
together in united strength.

The Yellow or Silver Pine is more frequently overturned than any other
tree on the Sierra, because its leaves and branches form a larger mass
in proportion to its height; while in many places it is planted
sparsely, leaving open lanes through which storms may enter with full
force. Furthermore, because it is distributed along the lower portion of
the range, which was the first to be left bare on the breaking up of the
ice-sheet at the close of the glacial winter, the soil it is growing
upon has been longer exposed to post-glacial weathering, and
consequently is in a more crumbling, decayed condition than the fresher
soils farther up the range, and therefore offers a less secure anchorage
for the roots. While exploring the forest zones of Mount Shasta, I
discovered the path of a hurricane strewn with thousands of pines of
this species. Great and small had been uprooted or wrenched off by sheer
force, making a clean gap, like that made by a snow avalanche. But
hurricanes capable of doing this class of work are rare in the Sierra;
and when we have explored the forests from one extremity of the range to
the other, we are compelled to believe that they are the most beautiful
on the face of the earth, however we may regard the agents that have
made them so.

There is always something deeply exciting, not only in the sounds of
winds in the woods, which exert more or less influence over every mind,
but in their varied water-like flow as manifested by the movements of
the trees, especially those of the conifers. By no other trees are they
rendered so extensively and impressively visible; not even by the lordly
tropic palms or tree-ferns responsive to the gentlest breeze. The waving
of a forest of the giant Sequoias is indescribably impressive and
sublime; but the pines seem to me the best interpreters of winds. They
are mighty waving golden-rods, ever in tune, singing and writing
wind-music all their long century lives. Little, however, of this noble
tree-waving and tree-music will you see or hear in the strictly alpine
portion of the forests. The burly Juniper whose girth sometimes more