t is maintained in marvelous beauty.

Beyond the silver firs I find the two-leaved pine (_Pinus contorta_,
var. _Murrayana_) forms the bulk of the forest up to an elevation of ten
thousand feet or more--the highest timber-belt of the Sierra. I saw a
specimen nearly five feet in diameter growing on deep, well-watered
soil at an elevation of about nine thousand feet. The form of this
species varies very much with position, exposure, soil, etc. On
stream-banks, where it is closely planted, it is very slender; some
specimens seventy-five feet high do not exceed five inches in diameter
at the ground, but the ordinary form, as far as I have seen, is well
proportioned. The average diameter when full grown at this elevation is
about twelve or fourteen inches, height forty or fifty feet, the
straggling branches bent up at the end, the bark thin and bedraggled
with amber-colored resin. The pistillate flowers form little crimson
rosettes a fourth of an inch in diameter on the ends of the branchlets,
mostly hidden in the leaf-tassels; the staminate are about three eighths
of an inch in diameter, sulphur-yellow, in showy clusters, giving a
remarkably rich effect--a brave, hardy mountaineer pine, growing
cheerily on rough beds of avalanche boulders and joints of rock
pavements, as well as in fertile hollows, standing up to the waist in
snow every winter for centuries, facing a thousand storms and blooming
every year in colors as bright as those worn by the sun-drenched trees
of the tropics.

A still hardier mountaineer is the Sierra juniper (_Juniperus
occidentalis_), growing mostly on domes and ridges and glacier
pavements. A thickset, sturdy, picturesque highlander, seemingly content
to live for more than a score of centuries on sunshine and snow; a truly
wonderful fellow, dogged endurance expressed in every feature, lasting
about as long as the granite he stands on. Some are nearly as broad as
high. I saw one on the shore of the lake nearly ten feet in diameter,
and many six to eight feet. The bark, cinnamon-colored, flakes off in
long ribbon-like strips with a satiny luster. Surely the most enduring
of all tree mountaineers, it never seems to die a natural death, or even
to fall after it has been killed. If protected from accidents, it would
perhaps be immortal. I saw some that had withstood an avalanche from
snowy Mount Hoffman cheerily putting out new branches, as if repeating,
like Grip, "Never say die." Some were simply stan