The main knotty trunk seems to be made up of craggy granite boulders like those on which it stands, being about the same color as the mossy, lichened boulders and about as rough.

Two moss-lined caves near the ground open back into the trunk, one on the north side, the other on the west, forming picturesque, romantic seats.
The largest of the main branches is eighteen feet and nine inches in circumference, and some of the long pendulous branchlets droop over the stream at the foot of the fall where it is gray with spray.

The leaves are glossy yellow-green, ever in motion from the wind from the fall.

It is a fine place to dream in, with falls, cascades, cool rocks lined with hypnum three inches thick; shaded with maple, dogwood, alder, willow; grand clumps of lady-ferns where no hand may touch them; light filtering through translucent leaves; oaks fifty feet high; lilies eight feet high in a filled lake basin near by, and the finest libocedrus groves and tallest ferns and goldenrods.
In the main river canyon below the Vernal Fall and on the shady south side of the Valley there are a few groves of the silver fir (Abies concolor), and superb forests of the magnificent species round the rim of the Valley.
On the tops of the domes is found the sturdy, storm-enduring red cedar (Juniperus occidentalis).

It never makes anything like a forest here, but stands out separate and independent in the wind, clinging by slight joints to the rock, with scarce a handful of soil in sight of it, seeming to depend chiefly on snow and air for nourishment, and yet it has maintained tough health on this diet for two thousand years or more.
The largest hereabouts are from five to six feet in diameter and fifty feet in height.
The principal river-side trees are poplar, alder, willow, broad-leaved maple, and Nuttall's flowering dogwood.