ated thawing and freezing is
firmly compacted, you may ride over the prostrate groves without seeing
a single branch or leaf of them. No other of our alpine conifers so
finely veils its strength; poised in thin, white sunshine, clad with
branches from head to foot, it towers in unassuming majesty, drooping
as if unaffected with the aspiring tendencies of its race, loving the
ground, conscious of heaven and joyously receptive of its blessings,
reaching out its branches like sensitive tentacles, feeling the light
and reveling in it. The largest specimen I ever found was nineteen
feet seven inches in circumference. It was growing on the edge of Lake
Hollow, north of Mount Hoffman, at an elevation of 9250 feet above the
level of the sea, and was probably about a hundred feet in height. Fine
groves of mature trees, ninety to a hundred feet in height, are growing
near the base of Mount Conness. It is widely distributed from near the
south extremity of the high Sierra northward along the Cascade Mountains
of Oregon and Washington and the coast ranges of British Columbia to
Alaska, where it was first discovered in 1827. Its northernmost limit,
so far as I have observed, is in the icy fiords of Prince William Sound
in latitude 61 degrees, where it forms pure forests at the level of the
sea, growing tall and majestic on the banks of glaciers. There, as in
the Yosemite region, it is ineffably beautiful, the very loveliest of
all the American conifers.

The White-Bark Pine

The Dwarf Pine, or White-Bark Pine (Pinus albicaulis), forms the extreme
edge of the timberline throughout nearly the whole extent of the Range
on both flanks. It is first met growing with the two-leaved pine on the
upper margin of the alpine belt, as an erect tree from fifteen to thirty
feet high and from one to two feet in diameter hence it goes straggling
up the flanks of the summit peaks, upon moraines or crumbling ledges,
wherever it can get a foothold, to an elevation of from 10,000 to 12,000
feet, where it dwarfs to a mass of crumpled branches, covered with
slender shoots, each tipped with a short, close-packed, leaf tassel. The
bark is smooth and purplish, in some places almost white. The flowers
are bright scarlet and rose-purple, giving a very flowery appearance
little looked for in such a tree. The cones are about three inches long,
an inch and a half in diameter, grow in rigid clusters, and are dark
chocolate in color while young, and bear beaut