102 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



and live with them, as free from schemes and 

 cares and time as the trees themselves. 



And surely nobody will find anything hard in 

 this. Even the blind must enjoy these woods, 

 drinking their fragrance, listening to the music 

 of the winds in their groves, and fingering their 

 flowers and plumes and cones and richly fur- 

 rowed boles. The kind of study required is as 

 easy and natural as breathing. Without any 

 great knowledge of botany or wood-craft, in a 

 single season you may learn the name and some- 

 thing more of nearly every kind of tree in the 

 park. 



With few exceptions all the Sierra trees are 

 growing in the park, — nine species of pine, two 

 of silver fir, one each of Douglas spruce, liboce- 

 drus, hemlock, juniper, and sequoia, — sixteen 

 conifers in all, and about the same number of 

 round-headed trees, oaks, maples, poplars, laurel, 

 alder, dogwood, tumion, etc. 



The first of the conifers you meet in going up 

 the range from the west is the digger nut-pine 

 (Pinus Sabiniana), a remarkably open, airy, 

 wide-branched tree, forty to sixty feet high, with 

 long, sparse, grayish green foliage and large 

 cones. At a height of fifteen to thirty feet from 

 the ground the trunk usually divides into several 

 main branches, which, after bearing away from 

 one another, shoot straight up and form separate 

 heads as if the axis of the tree had been broken, 



