124 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



spicuous. The wood is red, fine-grained, and 

 fragrant; the bark bright cinnamon and red, 

 and in thrifty trees is strikingly braided and re- 

 ticulated, flaking off in thin lustrous ribbons, 

 which the Indians used to weave into matting 

 and coarse cloth. These brown unshakable pil- 

 lars, standing solitary on polished pavements 

 with bossy masses of foliage in their arms, are 

 exceedingly picturesque, and never fail to catch 

 the eye of the artist. They seem sole survivors 

 of some ancient race, wholly unacquainted with 

 their neighbors. 



I have spent a good deal of time, trying to 

 determine their age, but on account of dry rot 

 which honeycombs most of the old ones, I never 

 got a complete count of the largest. Some are 

 undoubtedly more than two thousand years old ; 

 for though on good moraine soil they grow about 

 as fast as oaks, on bare pavements and smoothly 

 glaciated overswept granite ridges in the dome 

 region they grow extremely slowly. One on the 

 Starr King ridge, only two feet eleven inches in 

 diameter, was eleven hundred and forty years 

 old. Another on the same ridge, only one foot 

 seven and a half inches in diameter, had reached 

 the age of eight hundred and thirty-four years. 

 The first fifteen inches from the bark of a me- 

 dium-sized tree — six feet in diameter — on the 

 north Tenaya pavement had eight hundred and 

 fifty-nine layers of wood, or fifty-seven to the 



