It seems to be a
survivor of some ancient race, wholly unacquainted with its neighbors.
Its broad stumpiness, of course, makes wind-waving or even shaking out
of the question, but it is not this rocky rigidity that constitutes its
silence. In calm, sun-days the sugar pine preaches like an enthusiastic
apostle without moving a leaf. On level rocks the juniper dies standing
and wastes insensibly out of existence like granite, the wind exerting
about as little control over it, alive or dead, as is does over a
glacier boulder.
I have spent a good deal of time trying to determine the age of these
wonderful trees, but as all of the very old ones are honey-combed with
dry rot I never was able to get a complete count of the largest. Some
are undoubtedly more than 2000 years old, for though on deep moraine
soil they grow about as fast as some of the pines, on bare pavements and
smoothly glaciated, overswept ridges in the dome region they grow very
slowly. One on the Starr King Ridge only two feet eleven inches in
diameter was 1140 years old forty years ago. Another on the same ridge,
only one foot seven and a half inches in diameter, had reached the age
of 834 years. The first fifteen inches from the bark of a medium-size
tree six feet in diameter, on the north Tenaya pavement, had 859 layers
of wood.
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