All Was Bright With That Brilliancy Of Sky And Atmosphere, That
Blaze Of Sunshine And Universal Glitter, Which I Never Saw Till I
Came To California, Combined With An Elasticity In The Air Which
Removed All Lassitude, And Gives One Spirit Enough For Anything.
On either side of the Truckee great sierras rose like walls,
castellated, embattled, rifted, skirted and crowned with pines of
enormous size, the walls now and then breaking apart to show some
snow-slashed peak rising into a heaven of intense, unclouded,
sunny blue.
At this altitude of 6,000 feet one must learn to be
content with varieties of Coniferae, for, except for aspens,
which spring up in some places where the pines have been cleared
away, and for cotton-woods, which at a lower level fringe the
streams, there is nothing but the bear cherry, the raspberry, the
gooseberry, the wild grape, and the wild currant. None of these
grew near the Truckee, but I feasted my eyes on pines[4] which,
though not so large as the Wellingtonia of the Yosemite, are
really gigantic, attaining a height of 250 feet, their huge
stems, the warm red of cedar wood, rising straight and branchless
for a third of their height, their diameter from seven to fifteen
feet, their shape that of a larch, but with the needles long and
dark, and cones a foot long. Pines cleft the sky; they were
massed wherever level ground occurred; they stood over the
Truckee at right angles, or lay across it in prostrate grandeur.
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