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Pines — Part 3

The sugar pine is various in form, spreading its slender arms like feathery drooping plumes. Like the crown of a palm tree, but far broader than the royalest of palms, it rises above a feathering of shorter branches, and above all neighbour trees. Or with more room, the tapering spire of a fir tree is imitated. The average tree tapers to the top, and is feathered half way down with short horizontal branches.

"The old trees are as tellingly varied and picturesque as oaks. No two are alike, and we are tempted to stop and admire every one we come to as it stands silent in the calm, balsam-scented sunshine or waving in accord with enthusiastic storms. No traveller, whether he be a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest."--John Muir.

Rocky Mountain White Pine.--(P. flexilis, James.)--A broad, stout-trunked tree, 40 to 75 feet high, with ascending branches in a diffuse head. Bark very dark, furrowed and broken into square plates; younger stems smooth, pale grey or white. Wood light, soft, close grained, yellow to red. Buds scaly, pointed, clustered at branch tips. Leaves in fives, thick, rigid, 1 1/2 to 3 inches long, dark green, sheathed and tufted on end of branches; shed during fifth or sixth years. Flowers like P. Strobus, but rose coloured. Fruit annual, cones 3 to 10 inches long, purple; scales rounded and abruptly beaked at apex; seeds with narrow wings all around; ripe in September. Preferred habitat, mountain slopes, at altitude of 7,000 to 12,000 feet. Distribution, Rocky Mountains, Alberta (British Columbia), Montana to Mexico and California. Uses: Important timber tree of semi-arid regions. Used in construction as P. Strobus is.

It is a fortunate region that has its own white or soft pine for all sorts of construction. This "limber pine" is notable because it thrives where other pines fail. It grows on the sides of the desert ranges of mountains in Nevada and Arizona. It is the chief dependence of builders on the eastern slopes of the Rockies in Montana. Lacking this pine, the lumber problem in these regions would be serious. It is true that trees growing in scattered groups and open forests as these do produce knotty timber; but the important fact is that P. flexilis does grow in these regions, and the trees are appreciated, knots and all.

The best specimens grow in New Mexico and Arizona--sturdy trees, as broad as they are high, with trunks 5 feet through, and limbs of exceeding length, flexibility and toughness. From these characters the tree takes its specific name and the common name given above.

The Rocky Mountain white pine grows where the wind tests the fibre of its long arms, which reach out and up as if eager to meet the challenge and prove themselves. The foliage is thick and beautiful, even where the tree crouches a prostrate shrub at the timber line. The tree's blossoms are its most striking feature. The staminate clusters are tinged with rose colour. On the tips of the branches the slim cones glow from their first appearance like tips of flame. The summer deepens them to purple, and as they turn down they fade to cinnamon-brown, before the springing of the scales releases the almost wingless seeds. In the most favourable locations the branchlets are stout and the cones approach a foot in length. Farther north, and at higher levels, the twigs are slim and the cones considerably shorter.

The White-Bark Pine (P. albicaulis, Engelm.) shouts its name at the traveller who climbs the snow-clad peaks where it rims the forests at the timber line. The snowy bark glistens in the sun as if it reflected the icy mantle that blankets the roots for a large part of the year. Its range is from British Columbia to Montana and Wyoming, south into California. It keeps near the timber line, but goes down to 5,000 feet level, becoming a tree 40 feet high in some places. Usually it is flattened and broad topped; its matted branches, cumbered with needles and snow, make a platform on which one may walk with perfect safety. Travellers sometimes spread their blankets upon the branches and sleep as comfortably as on a spring bed. These gnarled, shrubby trees are often astonishingly old. John Muir measured one carefully. It was

"Three feet high, with a stem 6 inches in diameter at the ground, and branches that spread out horizontally as if it had grown up against a ceiling; yet it was 426 years old, and one of its supple branchlets, about 1/8 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 7 feet in diameter and over 200 feet high."