THE HIGH PLACES 



IVednesday) the thirtieth. 



In a sunny frosty morning, the camp still in morning 

 shadow, something to the tolerant amusement of Jay, the 

 Missouri guide, the artist gave himself the aesthetic pleasure of 

 a morning toilet in the open, at the fountain of clear and cold 

 mountain water, carried in a split log conduit, that made its 

 tinkling plunge among its night-grown icicles fifty feet from the 

 cabin door. Through the morning, while other members of the 

 party oiled boots, and were busy with other camp duties, 

 the artist, three hundred yards down the valley, with his sketch- 

 ing kit, alternately lifted color, despaired, and prayed the gods 

 of all beauty as he studied the changing expression of Baldy's 

 face, and sought to indicate the atmospheric depth and myste- 

 ries of his attendant regiments of pine and fir. 



This afternoon, under guidance of Jay, the colonel. Art and 

 the artist were taken up the camp's protecting mountainside. 

 Leaving a difficult trail through the firs, came a succession of 

 upland parks from which rose noble groups of firs and nut pines. 

 Next to the stubborn dignity of the nut pine, the thing most 

 remarked was the splendid spiring symmetry of the fir families, 

 whose darkly green steeples in ordered irregularity pointed the 

 soaring slopes over which the party rode. 



The beauty of the firs and pines is a constant joy. Where 

 the hills break into grass-covered slopes and near-levels, as they 

 do constantly, the firs arrange themselves in beautiful, sym- 

 metrical groups, a family of smaller trees round about some 

 towering patriarch from whose seed the circle about him has 

 sprung. Almost invariably there is within the charmed circle 

 a little secluded space of grass and wild flowers, and shade-loving 

 brush and moss, in which the wild birds and wild animals find 

 harborage. 



The nut pine, too is another glorious tree. With a nearly 

 smooth trunk, branching irregularly with stubborn strength into 

 a splendid doming mass of foliage, growing always in proud 

 isolation, it is a veritable king of the high levels. 



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