In calm, sun-days the sugar pine preaches like an enthusiastic apostle without moving a leaf.

On level rocks the juniper dies standing and wastes insensibly out of existence like granite, the wind exerting about as little control over it, alive or dead, as is does over a glacier boulder.
I have spent a good deal of time trying to determine the age of these wonderful trees, but as all of the very old ones are honey-combed with dry rot I never was able to get a complete count of the largest.

Some are undoubtedly more than 2000 years old, for though on deep moraine soil they grow about as fast as some of the pines, on bare pavements and smoothly glaciated, overswept ridges in the dome region they grow very slowly.

One on the Starr King Ridge only two feet eleven inches in diameter was 1140 years old forty years ago.

Another on the same ridge, only one foot seven and a half inches in diameter, had reached the age of 834 years.