LANDSCAPE CHARACTERS 67 



when you compare with them the trunks of the six-foot sugar pines, 

 which elsewhere you had looked on as forest monarchs, that the size 

 of the sequoias begins to dawn upon you. Where these great trees 

 stand close, the ground is free of undergrowth in their shade, but where 

 the sunshine can filter through to the forest floor, there may be groups 

 of smaller trees and shrubs, dwarfed and insignificant in relation to 

 the sequoias, but forcing the party to wind about among them with 

 the pack animals, seeking a level open place for a camp. Perhaps it is 

 late afternoon when you reach the little bench or basin in the moun- 

 tainside where the "Big Trees" are growing, and the sun has already 

 sunk behind a ridge to the west. The trunks of the great yellow pines, 

 sugar pines, and Douglas firs, perhaps a hundred feet high and six in 

 diameter, stand in the growing dusk swaying slightly in the evening 

 wind, but above their heads, borne on red-brown trunks immovable 

 as stone towers, the short heavy gnarled branches and the close-massed 

 foliage of the sequoias, green-gold against the darkening blue of the 

 zenith, still catch the evening light. It may aid your understanding 

 to know that these trees were much as they now are when the Norse- 

 men first set foot on this continent, that they were old when Caesar was 

 born ; but even without such helps to the imagination, these trees have 

 a majestic — even an awe-inspiring — quality which is more usually 

 the effect of great mountains or of the sea : you feel a sense at the 

 same time of your own utter insignificance and yet of your being a 

 part of a vast, solemn, ordered, and inevitable scheme.* 



Any one traveling in the High Sierras inevitably seeks out the The Sierra 

 location of the mountain meadows for the reason that there, and often fountain 

 only there, can be found sufficient feed for his animals ; but beside that 

 use, such a meadow is in itself extremely beautiful, with a fairly definite 

 characteristic beauty. f (See Plate 8.) It may lie so close to the 

 peaks as to occupy the old glacier cirque at the head of a mountain 

 valley, free from snow only a few months of the year, or it may lie any- 

 where along the course of the stream where a landslide may have made 

 a dam and so eventually a flat of deposited loam. In any case the 



* Cf. Lafcadio Hearn quotation, Chapter VI, p. 80. Also see chapter, The 

 Sequoia and General Grant National Parks, in John Muir's Our National Parks (1901). 

 t Cf. The Wild Gardens of the Yosemite Park, Muir, ibid. 



