ce the
beauty of the yosemite parks. These are the Mountain Live Oak and the
Kellogg Oak, named in honor of the admirable botanical pioneer of
California. Kellogg's Oak (_Quercus Kelloggii_) is a firm, bright,
beautiful tree, reaching a height of sixty feet, four to seven feet in
diameter, with wide-spreading branches, and growing at an elevation of
from 3000 to 5000 feet in sunny valleys and flats among the evergreens,
and higher in a dwarfed state. In the cliff-bound parks about 4000 feet
above the sea it is so abundant and effective it might fairly be called
the Yosemite Oak. The leaves make beautiful masses of purple in the
spring, and yellow in ripe autumn; while its acorns are eagerly gathered
by Indians, squirrels, and woodpeckers. The Mountain Live Oak (_Q.
Chrysolepis_) is a tough, rugged mountaineer of a tree, growing
bravely and attaining noble dimensions on the roughest earthquake
taluses in deep canons and yosemite valleys. The trunk is usually short,
dividing near the ground into great, wide-spreading limbs, and these
again into a multitude of slender sprays, many of them cord-like and
drooping to the ground, like those of the Great White Oak of the
lowlands (_Q. lobata_). The top of the tree where there is plenty
of space is broad and bossy, with a dense covering of shining leaves,
making delightful canopies, the complicated system of gray, interlacing,
arching branches as seen from beneath being exceedingly rich and
picturesque. No other tree that I know dwarfs so regularly and
completely as this under changes of climate due to changes in elevation.
At the foot of a canon 4000 feet above the sea you may find magnificent
specimens of this oak fifty feet high, with craggy, bulging trunks, five
to seven feet in diameter, and at the head of the canon, 2500 feet
higher, a dense, soft, low, shrubby growth of the same species, while
all the way up the canon between these extremes of size and habit a
perfect gradation may be traced. The largest I have seen was fifty feet
high, eight feet in diameter, and about seventy-five feet in spread. The
trunk was all knots and buttresses, gray like granite, and about as
angular and irregular as the boulders on which it was growing--a type of
steadfast, unwedgeable strength.

CHAPTER IX

THE DOUGLAS SQUIRREL
(_Sciurus Douglasii_)

The Douglas Squirrel is by far the most interesting and influential of
the California sciuridae, surpassing every other species in fo