Snow.
The wear of water.
How odd it seems after the sands to see the snow. The long wedge lying in the barranca under the shadowed lee of an enormous spur is not very inviting looking. It has melted down and accumulated dust and dirt until it looks almost like a bed of clay. But the little stream running away from its lowest part is pure; and it dashes through the canyon, tumbles into little pools, and slips over shelving precipices like a thing of life. Could the canyon have been cut out of the solid rock by that little stream? Who knows! Besides, the stream is not always so small. The descent is steep, and bowlders carried down by great floods cut faster than water.
The pines.
Barrancas and escarpments.
It is dangerous travelling—this crossing of snow-banks in June. You never know how soft they may be nor how deep they may drop you. Better head the snow-bank no matter how much hard brush and harder stones there may be to fight against. The pines are above you and they are beginning to appear near you. Beside you is a solitary shaft of dead timber, its branches wrenched from it long ago and its trunk left standing against the winds. And on the ground about you there are fallen trunks, crumbled almost to dust, and near them young pines springing up to take the place of the fallen. Manzanita and buckthorn and lilac are here, too; but the chaparral is not so dense as lower down. You pass through it easily and press on upward, still upward, in the cool mountain-air, until you are above the barranca of snow and under the lee of a vast escarpment. The wall is perpendicular and you have to circle it looking for an exit higher up. For half an hour you move across a talus of granite blocks, and then through a break in the wall you clamber up to the top of the escarpment. You are on a high spur which leads up a pine-clad slope. You are coming nearer your quest.
Under the pines.
Bushes, ferns, and mosses.
The pines!—at last the pines! How gigantic they seem, those trees standing so calm and majestic in their mantles of dark green—how gigantic to eyes grown used to the little palo verde or the scrubby grease wood! All classes of pines are here—sugar pines, bull pines, white pines, yellow pines—not in dense numbers standing close together as in the woods of Oregon, but scattered here and there with open aisles through which the sunshine falls in broad bars. Many small bushes—berry bushes most of them—are under the pines; and with them are grasses growing in tufts, flowers growing in beds, and bear-clover growing in fields. Aimless and apparently endless little streams wander everywhere, and ferns and mosses go with them. Bowlder streams they are, for the rounded bowlder is still in evidence—in the stream, on the bank, and under the roots of the pine.
Mountain-quail.