1 66 On the Campus 



and shale and sand. The red beds yield easily to erosion. 

 The washings from their wasted flanks have tinged the 

 desert far below, and reddened the walls of every rocky 

 canon on the way. Sloping terraces and flat-topped hills 

 afford a soil rocky but not infertile, supporting once 

 more its own peculiar vegetation. Here are still the 

 shin-oaks, it is true, but all overshadowed by other nobler 

 trees; here is Berberis trifoUata, the Texan barberry; 

 here is Pinus edulis, Engelmann's nut pine, and most 

 characteristic and perfect of all, here stands Juniperus 

 pachyphlmum, the mountain juniper, great forests of it, 

 ancient trees betimes, all comparatively low, but with 

 giant trunks six or eight feet in diameter; these time- 

 defying cedars are the trees of the red beds. With the 

 junipers, especially as we pass their upper limits and 

 come out upon the calcareous cretaceous swells and 

 plains, occur another oak or two. The soils are now re- 

 markably rich in lime. The waters that fall on the 

 higher mountain levels escape above the red bed shales, 

 but so impregnated with lime that they actually form a 

 new stony deposit often for a distance of many rods 

 about the point of exit. On these calcareous soils stands 

 now the forest, along the very summit of the mountain, 

 nine thousand feet above sea-level, a magnificent forest 

 of spruce and pine and fir: Pseudotsuga, mucronata, the 

 Douglas spruce, five or six feet in thickness; Abies con- 

 color ; Pinus ponderosa in beautiful perfection of its im- 

 mortal youth; Pinus flexilis at its very best; a typical 

 Oregon forest six or eight miles wide and some twenty 

 long, crowning the summit of this isolated mountain 

 peak in the midst of the deserts of southern New Mexico, 



