Ascending from the lowest branch to the topmost is like stepping up stairs through a blaze of white light, every needle thrilling and shining as if with religious ecstasy.
Unfortunately there are but few sugar pines in the Valley, though in the King's yosemite they are in glorious abundance.

The incense cedar (Libocedrus decurrens) with cinnamon-colored bark and yellow-green foliage is one of the most interesting of the Yosemite trees.

Some of them are 150 feet high, from six to ten feet in diameter, and they are never out of sight as you saunter among the yellow pines.

Their bright brown shafts and towers of flat, frondlike branches make a striking feature of the landscapes throughout all the seasons.

In midwinter, when most of the other trees are asleep, this cedar puts forth its flowers in millions,--the pistillate pale green and inconspicuous, but the staminate bright yellow, tingeing all the branches and making the trees as they stand in the snow look like gigantic goldenrods.