The Pines 



shrub at the timber line. The tree's blossoms are its most 

 striking feature. The staminate clusters are tinged with 

 rose colour. On the tips of the branches the slim cones 

 glow from their first appearance like tips of flame. The summer 

 deepens them to purple, and as they turn down they fade to 

 cinnamon-brown, before the springing of the scales releases the 

 almost wingless seeds. In the most favourable locations the 

 branchlets are stout and the cones approach a foot in length. 

 Farther north, and at higher levels, the twigs are slim and the 

 cones considerably shorter. 



The White-Bark Pine {P, alhicauli^, Engelm.) shouts its 

 name at the traveller who climbs the snow-clad peaks where it 

 rims the forests at the timber line. The snowy bark glistens in 

 the sun as if it reflected the icy mantle that blankets the roots for 

 a large part of the year. Its range is from British Columbia to 

 Montana and Wyoming, south into California. It keeps near the 

 timber line, but goes down to 5,000 feet level, becoming a tree 

 40 feet high in some places. Usually it is flattened and broad 

 topped; its matted branches, cumbered with needles and snow, 

 make a platform on which one may walk with perfect safety. 

 Travellers sometimes spread their blankets upon the branches and 

 sleep as comfortably as on a spring bed. These gnarled, shrubby 

 trees are often astonishingly old. John Muir measured one care- 

 fully. It was 



"Three feet high, with a stem 6 inches in diameter at the 

 ground, and branches that spread out horizontally as if it had 

 grown up against a ceiling; yet it was 426 years old, and one of 

 its supple branchlets, about \ of an inch in diameter inside the 

 bark, was seventy-five years old, and so tough that 1 tied it into 

 knots. At the age of this dwarf many of the sugar and yellow 

 pines and sequoias are 7 feet in diameter and over 200 feet high." 



The Foxtail Pines include two species whose branchlets 

 are clothed with crowded leaf bundles, while the branches are 

 bare. P. Balfoiiriana, M. Murr., has stiff, stout, dark-green 

 leaves lightened by pale linings. The tree forms an open pyra- 

 mid of more or less irregularity when old, but picturesque, 

 whether a tree of 40 to 80 feet on the higher foothills of the Cali- 

 fornia mountains or a straggling shrub at the timber line. 



P. aristata, Engelm., the other species, has the same brush- 

 of-a-fox leaf distribution, and it is distinguished by the long, 



30 



