st
time is when you have the longest leave to stay. And here is a hint if
you would attempt the stateliest approaches; travel light, and as much
as possible live off the land. Mulligatawny soup and tinned lobster will
not bring you the favor of the woodlanders.

Every canon commends itself for some particular pleasantness; this for
pines, another for trout, one for pure bleak beauty of granite
buttresses, one for its far-flung irised falls; and as I say, though
some are easier going, leads each to the cloud shouldering citadel.
First, near the canon mouth you get the low-heading full-branched,
one-leaf pines. That is the sort of tree to know at sight, for the
globose, resin-dripping cones have palatable, nourishing kernels, the
main harvest of the Paiutes. That perhaps accounts for their growing
accommodatingly below the limit of deep snows, grouped sombrely on the
valley-ward slopes. The real procession of the pines begins in the rifts
with the long-leafed _Pinus Jeffreyi_, sighing its soul away upon the
wind. And it ought not to sigh in such good company. Here begins the
manzanita, adjusting its tortuous stiff stems to the sharp waste of
boulders, its pale olive leaves twisting edgewise to the sleek, ruddy,
chestnut stems; begins also the meadowsweet, burnished laurel, and the
million unregarded trumpets of the coral-red pentstemon. Wild life is
likely to be busiest about the lower pine borders. One looks in hollow
trees and hiving rocks for wild honey. The drone of bees, the chatter of
jays, the hurry and stir of squirrels, is incessant; the air is odorous
and hot. The roar of the stream fills up the morning and evening
intervals, and at night the deer feed in the buckthorn thickets. It is
worth watching the year round in the purlieus of the long-leafed pines.
One month or another you get sight or trail of most roving mountain
dwellers as they follow the limit of forbidding snows, and more bloom
than you can properly appreciate.

Whatever goes up or comes down the streets of the mountains, water has
the right of way; it takes the lowest ground and the shortest passage.
Where the rifts are narrow, and some of the Sierra canons are not a
stone's throw from wall to wall, the best trail for foot or horse winds
considerably above the watercourses; but in a country of cone-bearers
there is usually a good strip of swardy sod along the canon floor. Pine
woods, the short-leafed Balfour and Murryana of the high Sierras, are