40
CONIFER.®.
the seventh or eighth year. The flowers open from the first to the middle of July, or as soon as thesnow under which this tree is usually buried for many months of the year has melted sufficiently toexpose its branches to the sun. The staminate flowers are borne in short spikes and are oval, withscarlet anthers tipped by spur-like crests, and surrounded by involucres of eight or nine bracts. Thepistillate flowers are oblong, sessile, clustered, about one third of an inch thick, with bright scarletscales, and are surrounded by oblong-lanceolate chestnut-brown bracts. The young cones grow butlittle during their first season, and in the winter are erect and hardly more than half an inch long;the following summer they become horizontal, and, increasing rapidly in size during a few weeks, arefully grown by the end of August, when they are oval or subglobose, horizontal, sessile, and from aninch and a half to three inches and a quarter long, with much thickened gradually pointed purplescales, the exposed portion being contracted on both sides to a sharp edge bearing a stout nearlytriangular more or less incurved dark tip ; they discharge their seeds early in the autumn and mostlyfall before winter. The seeds are ovate, acute, subcylindrical or somewhat flattened on one side bypressure against the bracts of the scales above, from one third to nearly one half of an inch in lengthand about one third of an inch in diameter, and are covered with a dark chestnut-brown hard thick coatproduced into a narrow marginal border; their wings are thin, chestnut-brown, and about one thirty-second of an inch wide, and remain attached to the scales when the seeds fall; the cotyledons varyfrom seven to nine in number.
Pinus albicaulis inhabits alpine slopes, growing on the most exposed ridges at elevations ofbetween five thousand and nearly twelve thousand feet above the sea-level, and mingling in thenorthern Rocky Mountains below with Pinus flexilis, and above with Abies lasiocarpa, and fartherwest with the Mountain Hemlock and Abies lasiocarpa. It forms the timber line on many of thehigh mountains of northwestern America , where it is distributed from about latitude 53° north in theRocky Mountains 1 and from the valley of the Iltasyouco River, 2 southward over all the high rangesof southern British Columbia , sometimes descending near the sea to altitudes of five thousand feet; inthe United States it extends southward along the Rocky Mountains to the Yellowstone plateau innorthwestern Wyoming , where it is common about the head-waters of the Gallatin, Madison, and Snake Rivers , often descending as low as seven thousand five hundred feet above the sea-level; 3 it occurson the Blue Mountains of Washington and Oregon , and on the Powder River and Warner Ranges ineastern Oregon , 4 and spreads along the Cascade Mountains of Washington and Oregon , where it isusually found at elevations of about six thousand feet; in California it forms extensive groves alongthe timber line on Mt. Shasta at eight thousand feet above the sea-level, ranges along the SierraNevada, where it is not common, to the slopes of Mt. Whitney, 5 and reappears on the San Bernardino Mountains , finding here its most southerly home, and forming on Grayback the upper border of theforest at altitudes of between ten thousand five hundred and eleven thousand six hundred and twenty-five feet. 6
The wood of Pinus albicaulis is light, soft, brittle, and close-grained. It is light brown, withthin nearly white sapwood, and contains thin bands of small summer cells, numerous inconspicuousresin passages, and obscure medullary rays. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.4165,a cubic foot weighing 25.96 pounds. The sweet seeds were gathered and eaten by the Indians,although Clark’s Crow, which tears the cones to pieces before they are ripe in order to devour theseeds, left them only scanty harvests. 7
2 G. M. Dawson, Can. Nat. n. ser. ix. 328.
3 Tweedy, Garden and Forest, i. 130 (Forests of the Yellowstone National Park ).
4 In the summer of 1896 Pinus albicaulis was found on the highest
peaks of the Warner Range east of Goose Lake by Dr. C. Hart
Merriam.
6 Coville, Contrib. U. Si Nat. Herb. iv. 221 ( Bot. Death ValleyExped.).
6 S. B. Parish, Zoe, iv. 350.
7 Newberry, Popular Science Monthly, xxxii. 36 (Food and FibrePlants of the North American Indians).