horizon. Move two or three miles
and camp at Tamarack Flat. Wandering in the woods here back of the pines
which bound the meadows, I found very noble specimens of the
magnificent silver fir, the tallest about two hundred and forty feet
high and five feet in diameter four feet from the ground.

_September 16._ Crawled slowly four or five miles to-day through the
glorious forest to Crane Flat, where we are camped for the night. The
forests we so admired in summer seem still more beautiful and sublime in
this mellow autumn light. Lovely starry night, the tall, spiring
tree-tops relieved in jet black against the sky. I linger by the fire,
loath to go to bed.

_September 17._ Left camp early. Ran over the Tuolumne divide and down a
few miles to a grove of sequoias that I had heard of, directed by the
Don. They occupy an area of perhaps less than a hundred acres. Some of
the trees are noble, colossal old giants, surrounded by magnificent
sugar pines and Douglas spruces. The perfect specimens not burned or
broken are singularly regular and symmetrical, though not at all
conventional, showing infinite variety in general unity and harmony; the
noble shafts with rich purplish brown fluted bark, free of limbs for one
hundred and fifty feet or so, ornamented here and there with leafy
rosettes; main branches of the oldest trees very large, crooked and
rugged, zigzagging stiffly outward seemingly lawless, yet unexpectedly
stooping just at the right distance from the trunk and dissolving in
dense bossy masses of branchlets, thus making a regular though greatly
varied outline,--a cylinder of leafy, outbulging spray masses,
terminating in a noble dome, that may be recognized while yet far off
upheaved against the sky above the dark bed of pines and firs and
spruces, the king of all conifers, not only in size but in sublime
majesty of behavior and port. I found a black, charred stump about
thirty feet in diameter and eighty or ninety feet high--a venerable,
impressive old monument of a tree that in its prime may have been the
monarch of the grove; seedlings and saplings growing up here and there,
thrifty and hopeful, giving no hint of the dying out of the species. Not
any unfavorable change of climate, but only fire, threatens the
existence of these noblest of God's trees. Sorry I was not able to get a
count of the old monument's annual rings.

Camp this evening at Hazel Green, on the broad back of the dividing
ridge near our old cam