summit peaks. Their stiff, crooked roots grip the
storm-beaten ledges like eagles' claws, while their lithe, cord-like
branches bend round compliantly, offering but slight holds for winds,
however violent. The other alpine conifers--the Needle Pine, Mountain
Pine, Two-leaved Pine, and Hemlock Spruce--are never thinned out by this
agent to any destructive extent, on account of their admirable toughness
and the closeness of their growth. In general the same is true of the
giants of the lower zones. The kingly Sugar Pine, towering aloft to a
height of more than 200 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 waterlike 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