402 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 398. 



which have been founded for their benefit. Knowledge — 

 technical knowledge — is needed more and more as the 

 struggle for existence becomes more complex and more 

 strenuous. The fruit-grower, the market-gardener, the 

 dairyman, the general farmer, who secures any return for 

 his labor beyond the mere necessities of life, achieves this 

 only by an intelligent adaptation of the teachings of science 

 and experience to his special case. He must study for 

 himself, and he needs all the help he can get from experts 

 whose lives are devoted to the solution of the problems of 

 agriculture in its broadest meaning. 



Observations in California Forests. 



THERE is so much to see in any forest tract that it 

 takes a long time for an observer to reach the point 

 when the minute daily life of the region becomes familiar. 

 I had never given any thought to this matter until it hap- 

 pened that we camped for the second time in the interest- 

 ing part of the Sierras along the south Yuba, by the famous 

 old Dutch Flat stage road near the snow-sheds in the Cisco 

 region. The place has a neglected aspect, because large 

 portions of the district are overpastured and nearly all the 

 valuable timber has been cut off In fact, no one can un- 

 derstand the country without some knowledge of its history. 

 When the stage road was built across, in the early sixties, 

 it became one of the great routes of travel to Nevada. 

 Thousands of vehicles passed over it every year, and 

 towns of considerable size grew up only a few miles apart. 

 The road was kept sprinkled from end to end, and was, in 

 brief, one of those great, but now forgotten, arteries of the 

 picturesque commerce of the mining period. A great moun- 

 tain river foams down the bottom of a vast gorge in the 

 everlasting granite. The portion of the gorge to which 

 these notes relate is at an elevation of about six thousand 

 feet. The sides of the gorge are fully fifteen hundred feet 

 higher, and from crest to crest across our camp, as the 

 eagle flies, the distance is not less than three miles. The 

 general aspect of the country from any elevation is that of 

 great and lonely desolation. Over naked granite cliffs rise 

 the snow peaks under the blue Sierra skies. But there was 

 a time when the whole gorge, excepting the more abrupt 

 granite points, was clothed in forests of Pinus ponderosa, 

 Abies concolor and other superb conifers. The enormous 

 demands made for the towns along the stage road, for the 

 construction of the railroad and for the snow-sheds, and the 

 frequent forest fires have laid the district waste. Once 

 there were saw-mills, cattle-yards, large hotels and stage 

 stations where our camp of this year stood, and more than 

 three thousand people, it is said, lived along a mile of the 

 rushing mountain river. 



The first impression one obtains of this wilderness is 

 that its usefulness has perished ; that there cannot be any 

 more forest here ; that the wasting soil is drifting slowly 

 from the rocks into the bottom of the gorge ; that even 

 lesser forms of vegetation will little by little disappear, and 

 the scant pasturage become even scantier. In this spirit, 

 therefore, shocked with the evidence of waste and slaugh- 

 ter, and profoundly discouraged, I began to consider 

 whether the reproductive powers of the forest were still 

 sufficient, under proper conditions, to restore it to its 

 former usefulness. The results of my observations were 

 in some respects surprising, although based upon simple 

 facts which should be known to every woodsman. 



The forest problems in this district, which is one of the 

 highways along which cattle and sheep are driven into the 

 fastnesses of the Sierras and back to the valleys, are as- 

 suredly as difficult and numerous as those of any other 

 part of California. If the leading species will reproduce 

 themselves here, or if some species are gaining foothold, 

 or if a little care and attention would enable the young 

 trees to overcome all obstacles, it seems certain that im- 

 mense areas in the Sierras elsewhere also could be refor- 

 ested. The enemies of the forest here are first the sheep, 

 second the cattle, third the old trees which die, and, felled 



by the winter storms, break down hundreds of the younger 

 trees ; lastly, the fires. 



In order to gain some idea of the powers of reproduction 

 possessed by the leading conifers, I climbed a mass of 

 almost naked granite, covering, perhaps, twenty acres of 

 ground. Its seemingly barren summit was three hundred 

 yards in a direct line from any specimen of Pinus pon- 

 derosa, and far above it. Nevertheless, in minute crevices 

 and pitted hollows the size of a thimble, where a few grains 

 of sand had drifted, there were young trees of P. pon- 

 derosa — last winter's seedlings. In one crevice eighteen 

 inches long, and too narrow for my knife-blade to enter, 

 nine such tiny Pines were growing. The seeds must have 

 caught in small inequalities of the surface and thrust their 

 roots downward in a crack made by the frost. The seed- 

 ing of this barren spot must have come from cones hurri- 

 cane-driven, or from some stunted tree since torn from the 

 rocks. All around this granite crest, in every hollow, Pine- 

 trees were beginning to root. Here and there some had 

 perished, but they were slowly taking possession. As the 

 soil became better, and where there was a barrowful of 

 sand instead of a handful, Abies concolor and Libocedrus 

 decurrens mingled with the Pines. While no one would 

 expect to see a forest of merchantable timber produced 

 upon these granite walls, the enormous reproductive ability 

 of the Pines needs no further illustration. 



The valleys along the river contain deep and rich beds 

 of soil and leaf-mold in perfect condition for carrying im- 

 mense timber growth. Upon one-half acre of such soil I 

 counted thirty-three stumps of Pinus Lambertiana, P. pon- 

 derosa and Abies concolor. The largest stump was about 

 eight feet in diameter. Even here small trees are continu- 

 ally reproduced every spring, to be trampled dovi^n every 

 summer, for a few stunted trees in the rocks still scatter 

 their seeds over the desolated nook. I am convinced that 

 over this entire district, from the lowest point in the gorge 

 to the highest pinnacle of rocks. Nature still plants enough 

 seedlings yearly to produce as many seedling trees as the 

 district will carry, but only one tree in a thousand ever 

 arrives at maturity. 



Over all this region there are very beautiful groves of 

 second-growth timber, from twenty to forty years old. The 

 trouble with most of these is that they are often broken 

 dovirn in windrows by the fall of dead trees, or by masses 

 of snow. Sometimes one sees little groves of several acres, 

 in the rich flats, which are almost perfect, but the need of 

 the axe is in most cases very great. A tree which has 

 grown upright for five or six feet, if then broken down, the 

 leader turning at right angles or bending to the ground, 

 can never again make a shapely top. Some of these 

 second-growth groves make one's heart ache, they are so 

 forlorn. One wishes to take an axe and spend a week 

 there from dawn to dark, cutting out the distorted trees so 

 as to give the rest a chance. There are more than enough 

 straight trees on each acre of such land to make a prosper- 

 ous forest. The way these windrows fall is difficult to 

 describe without the aid of a photograph. In one case 

 which I studied, a dry Fir-tree, perhaps a hundred feet 

 high and two feet in diameter at the base— a tree which 

 could easily have been removed by a forester, without do- 

 ing any injury to the young groves — had slowly sagged 

 downward, year after year, until last winter it came over 

 upon the young trees, breaking down a number of the 

 largest which were from twenty to fifty feet high ; these, of 

 course, brought down still others, bending them so that in 

 all about seventy -five trees of over five feet in height were 

 practically destroyed by the weight of the bending trees 

 and of the snow, which in this district usually lies fifteen 

 feet deep on the level. 



Agricultural value, except for temporary pasture, this 

 region does not possess. It can never be settled with 

 farmers, nor with miners, for it is far above the farming belt 

 and the mineral belt of California. It will never again be on 

 a route of travel, unless civilization goes back to the stage 

 coach. If it could be reforested, the fish and game supply 



