The Day Was Full Of Perfect Indian-Summer Sunshine, Calm
And Bracing.
Jays and Clarke crows made a pleasant stir in the
foothill pines and junipers; grasshoppers danced in the hazy light,
and rattled on the wing in pure glee, reviving suddenly from the
torpor of a frosty October night to exuberant summer joy.
The
squirrels were working industriously among the falling nuts; ripe
willows and aspens made gorgeous masses of color on the russet
hillsides and along the edges of the small streams that threaded the
higher ravines; and on the smooth sloping uplands, beneath the foxtail
pines and firs, the ground was covered with brown grasses, enriched
with sunflowers, columbines, and larkspurs and patches of linosyris,
mostly frost-nipped and gone to seed, yet making fine bits of yellow
and purple in the general brown.
At a height of about ninety-five hundred feet we passed through a
magnificent grove of aspens, about a hundred acres in extent, through
which the mellow sunshine sifted in ravishing splendor, showing every
leaf to be as beautiful in color as the wing of a butterfly, and
making them tell gloriously against the evergreens. These extensive
groves of aspen are a marked feature of the Nevada woods. Some of the
lower mountains are covered with them, giving rise to remarkably
beautiful masses of pale, translucent green in spring and summer,
yellow and orange in autumn, while in winter, after every leaf has
fallen, the white bark of the boles and branches seen in mass seems
like a cloud of mist that has settled close down on the mountain,
conforming to all its hollows and ridges like a mantle, yet roughened
on the surface with innumerable ascending spires.
Just above the aspens we entered a fine, close growth of foxtail pine,
the tallest and most evenly planted I had yet seen. It extended along
a waving ridge tending north and south and down both sides with but
little interruption for a distance of about five miles. The trees
were mostly straight in the bole, and their shade covered the ground
in the densest places, leaving only small openings to the sun. A few
of the tallest specimens measured over eighty feet, with a diameter of
eighteen inches; but many of the younger trees, growing in tufts, were
nearly fifty feet high, with a diameter of only five or six inches,
while their slender shafts were hidden from top to bottom by a close,
fringy growth of tasseled branchlets. A few white pines and balsam
firs occur here and there, mostly around the edges of sunny openings,
where they enrich the air with their rosiny fragrance, and bring out
the peculiar beauties of the predominating foxtails by contrast.
Birds find grateful homes here - grouse, chickadees, and linnets, of
which we saw large flocks that had a delightfully enlivening effect.
But the woodpeckers are remarkably rare. Thus far I have noticed only
one species, the golden-winged; and but few of the streams are large
enough or long enough to attract the blessed ousel, so common in the
Sierra.
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