HE FIR FOREST, SIERRA NEVADA
MOUNTAINS]

The wood of the sugar pine, which is white and fine-grained, is
of greater value commercially than that of any of the other pines.
This fact leads the shake-maker and lumberman to seek out the noble
tree and mark it for destruction. The sugar pine, when once destroyed
in a given locality, rarely replaces itself, as it is crowded out
by the more vigorous conifers.

Scattered through the forests of yellow pine, cedar, and sugar
pine is the Douglas spruce, commonly known in the market as the
Oregon pine. This is the most important forest tree in Oregon and
Washington. It often grows to a height of three hundred feet, and
forms dense forests for hundreds of miles along the base and western
slope of the Cascade Range. In Washington it is found growing down
to the sea-level, but in the Sierra Nevada the requisite moisture
for its growth is not found much below an elevation of four thousand
feet.

As we go upward the pines become fewer and the firs and "Big Trees"
take their places. The Big Trees are found in scattered groves,
at an elevation of five thousand to eight thousand feet, for a
distance of two hundred and fifty miles along the slopes of the
Sierra Nevada mountains. The Sequoia, as the genus is called, which
also includes the redwood of the Coast ranges, is in many respects
the most remarkable of all our coniferous trees.

[Illustration: FIG. 127.--THE BIG TREE FOREST IN THE SIERRA NEVADA
MOUNTAINS]

After travelling through forests made up of other trees of great
size it is difficult at first to appreciate the magnitude of the
Big Trees. Rising from a swelling base, which is sometimes thirty
feet in diameter, the symmetrical trunk reaches up and up, finally
terminating in a top three hundred to three hundred and fifty feet
above the ground. Their size, their reddish-brown bark, and their
small cones, clearly distinguish these trees. Great holes have
been burned in many of them, and in the hollows thus formed men
have made for themselves comfortable living rooms. In one of the
southern groves a fallen hollow tree has been used as a cabin.

The Big Trees and redwoods are the last surviving species of a
genus which was once widely distributed over the earth. The ancestry
of the Sequoia can be traced farther back than that of any of the
other living conifers. Impressions of cones and small stems with
needles attached belonging to the Sequoia have been found in the
oldes