THE FORESTS OF THE YOSEMITE PARK 107 



clumps and beds, crinkled and pressed flat, over 

 which you can easily walk. Nevertheless in this 

 crushed, down-pressed, felted condition it clings 

 hardily to life, puts forth fresh leaves every 

 spring on the ends of its tasseled branchlets, 

 blooms bravely in the lashing blasts with abun- 

 dance of gay red and purple flowers, matures its 

 seeds in the short summers, and often outlives 

 the favored giants of the sun lands far below. 

 One of the trees that I examined was only about 

 three feet high, with a stem six inches in diame- 

 ter at the ground, and branches that spread out 

 horizontally as if they had grown up against a 

 ceiling ; yet it was four hundred and twenty-six 

 years old, and one of its supple branchlets, about 

 an eighth of an inch in diameter inside the bark, 

 was seventy-five years old, and so tough that I 

 tied it into knots. At the age of this dwarf 

 many of the sugar and yellow pines and sequoias 

 are seven feet in diameter and over two hundred 

 feet high. 



In detached clumps never touched by fire the 

 fallen needles of centuries of growth make fine 

 elastic mattresses for the weary mountaineer, while 

 the tasseled branchlets spread a roof over him, and 

 the dead roots, half resin, usually found in abun- 

 dance, make capital camp-fires, unquenchable in 

 thickest storms of rain or snow. Seen from a 

 distance the belts and patches darkening the 

 mountain sides look like mosses on a roof, and 



