144 THE PINES. 



amongst the most strikingly individual trees we have. Its brother, 

 the Piniis monticola, is not known to me in our Southern Sierra. It 

 is found in high altitudes of the Northern Sierra, from the headwaters 

 of the Tule river northward, and usually above the sugar pine belt. 



P. monticola, like the sugar pine, has five leaves in a fascicle, and 

 the foliage of the two is similar in color and texture. It is usually 

 less than 100 feet in height, with a trunk stout in comparison, covered 

 with a blackish bark, which is suffused with a rich, dark red tint. Its 

 cones are pendulous and green when young, like the sugar pine cones, 

 and resemble that species in the texture of the scales, but only four 

 to six inches long usually. This species has for an associate Abies 

 magnifica, the "Silver Fir" of certain portions of the Sierra Nevada; 

 and the two forming the upper belt of the thicker forest, are the most 

 important protectors of the headwaters of the reservation rivers, and 

 the chief builders of the forest-floor at these altitudes. 



Above P. monticola in altitude, in the great Sierra reservation, 

 occurs the thinly scattered, but beautiful "Pox-tail Pine," P. Bal- 

 fouriana. Sometimes it forms an open park-like forest, as at the 

 southern base of the Kaweah peaks, and west of Mt. Whitney and 

 Sheep mountain. It has the stout and comparatively short trunk of 

 P. monticola, but its leaves, in fascicles of five, are short, stiff, form- 

 ing cylindrical plumes at the ends of smaller branches, hence the 

 common name of "Fox-tail pine." The cones are nearly the size of 

 those of P. monticola, but the scales are of different texture and form, 

 and chocolate purple when young. 



There are also two alpine pines that grow dwarfed near the North- 

 ern Sierra snow line, above the Fox-tail pine, that have some charac- 

 teristics of the sugar pine. These are P. flexilis and P. albicaulis, the 

 former much rarer than the latter. The twigs and branches of the 

 alpine pines are very tough and flexible to resist the weight of snow 

 Dy which they are crushed down. Very old trees of these alpine pines 

 are often found only a few feet high, but widely spread over the 

 rocks. Sometimes one can walk over their tops, just as you can over 

 a close cropped cypress hedge. I do not see how anyone in our moun- 

 tains could be troubled to recognize the five-leaved, long coned sugar 

 pines. 



In the damp alpine valleys and on the edges of meadows we find 

 the tamarack pine (Pinus Murrayana). Its brother pine is the P. 

 contorta, a northern maritime pine. There is an extensive forest of 

 the tamarack pine on the northern base of the tree line of Grayback, 



