the ground was
covered with brown grasses, enriched with sunflowers, columbines, and
larkspurs and patches of linosyris, mostly frost-nipped and gone to
seed, yet making fine bits of yellow and purple in the general brown.

At a height of about ninety-five hundred feet we passed through a
magnificent grove of aspens, about a hundred acres in extent, through
which the mellow sunshine sifted in ravishing splendor, showing every
leaf to be as beautiful in color as the wing of a butterfly, and making
them tell gloriously against the evergreens. These extensive groves
of aspen are a marked feature of the Nevada woods. Some of the lower
mountains are covered with them, giving rise to remarkably beautiful
masses of pale, translucent green in spring and summer, yellow and
orange in autumn, while in winter, after every leaf has fallen, the
white bark of the boles and branches seen in mass seems like a cloud of
mist that has settled close down on the mountain, conforming to all
its hollows and ridges like a mantle, yet roughened on the surface with
innumerable ascending spires.

Just above the aspens we entered a fine, close growth of foxtail pine,
the tallest and most evenly planted I had yet seen. It extended along a
waving ridge tending north and south and down both sides with but little
interruption for a distance of about five miles. The trees were mostly
straight in the bole, and their shade covered the ground in the densest
places, leaving only small openings to the sun. A few of the tallest
specimens measured over eighty feet, with a diameter of eighteen inches;
but many of the younger trees, growing in tufts, were nearly fifty feet
high, with a diameter of only five or six inches, while their slender
shafts were hidden from top to bottom by a close, fringy growth of
tasseled branchlets. A few white pines and balsam firs occur here and
there, mostly around the edges of sunny openings, where they enrich the
air with their rosiny fragrance, and bring out the peculiar beauties of
the predominating foxtails by contrast.

Birds find grateful homes here--grouse, chickadees, and linnets, of
which we saw large flocks that had a delightfully enlivening effect. But
the woodpeckers are remarkably rare. Thus far I have noticed only one
species, the golden-winged; and but few of the streams are large enough
or long enough to attract the blessed ousel, so common in the Sierra.

On Wheeler's Peak, the dominating summit of the Snake