STEEP TRAILS 



sions I have made in the State was up through 

 a thick spicy forest of these trees to the top 

 of the highest summit of the Troy Range, 

 about ninety miles to the south of Hamilton. 

 The day was full of perfect Indian-summer 

 sunshine, calm and bracing. Jays and Clarke 

 crows made a pleasant stir in the foothill 

 pines and junipers; grasshoppers danced in 

 the hazy light, and rattled on the wing in pure 

 glee, reviving suddenly from the torpor of a 

 frosty October night to exuberant sunmier 

 joy. The squirrels were working industri- 

 ously among the falling nuts; ripe willows and 

 aspens made gorgeous masses of color on the 

 russet hillsides and along the edges of the 

 small streams that threaded the higher ravines; 

 and on the smooth sloping uplands, beneath 

 the foxtail pines and firs, the ground was cov- 

 ered with brown grasses, enriched with sun- 

 flowers, columbines, and larkspurs and patches 

 of linosyris, mostly frost-nipped and gone to 

 seed, yet making fine bits of yellow and purple 

 in the general brown. 



At a height of about ninety-five hundred 

 feet we passed through a magnificent grove 

 of aspens, about a hundred acres in extent, 

 through which the mellow sunshine sifted in 

 ravishing splendor, showing every leaf to be 

 as beautiful in color as the wing of a butter- 

 178 



