Furthermore, because it is
distributed along the lower portion of the range, which was the first to
be left bare on the breaking up of the ice-sheet at the close of the
glacial winter, the soil it is growing upon has been longer exposed to
post-glacial weathering, and consequently is in a more crumbling,
decayed condition than the fresher soils farther up the range, and
therefore offers a less secure anchorage for the roots.
While exploring the forest zones of Mount Shasta, I discovered the path
of a hurricane strewn with thousands of pines of this species. Great and
small had been uprooted or wrenched off by sheer force, making a clean
gap, like that made by a snow avalanche. But hurricanes capable of doing
this class of work are rare in the Sierra, and when we have explored the
forests from one extremity of the range to the other, we are compelled
to believe that they are the most beautiful on the face of the earth,
however we may regard the agents that have made them so.
There is always something deeply exciting, not only in the sounds of
winds in the woods, which exert more or less influence over every mind,
but in their varied waterlike flow as manifested by the movements of the
trees, especially those of the conifers.
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