170 THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA 



able of enduring more moisture about its roots than 

 any of its companions, excepting only the Sequoia. 



The largest specimens are about 150 feet high, 

 and seven feet in diameter. The bark is brown, of 

 a singularly rich tone very attractive to artists, and 

 the foliage is tinted with a warmer yellow than that 

 of any other evergreen in the woods. Casting your 

 eye over the general forest from some ridge-top, 

 the color alone of its spiry summits is sufficient to 

 identify it in any company. 



In youth, say up to the age of seventy or eighty 

 years, no other tree forms so strictly tapered a cone 

 from top to bottom. The branches swoop outward 

 and downward in bold curves, excepting the younger 

 ones near the top, which aspire, while the lowest 

 droop to the ground, and all spread out in flat, 

 ferny plumes, beautifully fronded, and imbricated 

 upon one another. As it becomes older, it grows 

 strikingly irregular and picturesque. Large special 

 branches put out at right angles from the trunk, form 

 big, stubborn elbows, and then shoot up parallel 

 with the axis. Very old trees are usually dead at 

 the top, the main axis protruding above ample 

 masses of green plumes, gray and lichen-covered, 

 and drilled full of acorn holes by the woodpeckers. 

 The plumes are exceedingly beautiful ; no waving 

 fern-frond in shady dell is more unreservedly beau 

 tiful in form and texture, or half so inspiring in 

 color and spicy fragrance. In its prime, the whole 

 tree is thatched with them, so that they shed off 

 rain and snow like a roof, making fine mansions for 

 storm-bound birds and mountaineers. But if you 

 would see the Libocedms in all its glory, you must 



