No lover of trees will ever forget his first meeting with the sugar pine.  In most coniferous trees there is a sameness of form and expression which at length becomes wearisome to most people who travel far in the woods.  But the sugar pines are as free from conventional forms as any of the oaks.  No two are so much alike as to hide their individuality from any observer.  Every tree is appreciated as a study in itself and proclaims in no uncertain terms the surpassing grandeur of the species.  The branches, mostly near the summit, are sometimes nearly forty feet long, feathered richly all around with short, leafy branchlets, and tasseled with cones a foot and a half long.  And when these superb arms are outspread, radiating in every direction, an immense crownlike mass is formed which, poised on the noble shaft and filled with sunshine, is one of the grandest forest objects conceivable.  But though so wild and unconventional when full-grown, the sugar pine is a remarkably regular tree in youth, a strict follower of coniferous fashions, slim, erect, tapering, symmetrical, every branch in place.  At the age of fifty or sixty years this shy, fashionable form begins to give way.  Special branches are thrust out away from the general outlines of the trees and bent down with cones.  Henceforth it becomes more and more original and independent in style, pushes boldly aloft into the winds and sunshine, growing ever more stately and beautiful, a joy and inspiration to every beholder.

Unfortunately, the sugar pine makes excellent lumber.  It is too good to live, and is already passing rapidly away before the woodman’s axe.  Surely out of all of the abounding forest wealth of Oregon a few specimens might be spared to the world, not as dead lumber, but as living trees.  A park of moderate extent might be set apart and protected for public use forever, containing at least a few hundreds of each of these noble pines, spruces, and firs.  Happy will be the men who, having the power and the love and benevolent forecast to do this, will do it.  They will not be forgotten.  The trees and their lovers will sing their praises, and generations yet unborn will rise up and call them blessed.

Dotting the prairies and fringing the edges of the great evergreen forests we find a considerable number of hardwood trees, such as the oak, maple, ash, alder, laurel, madrone, flowering dogwood, wild cherry, and wild apple.  The white oak (Quercus Garryana) is the most important of the Oregon oaks as a timber tree, but not nearly so beautiful as Kellogg’s oak (Q.  Kelloggii).  The former is found mostly along the Columbia River, particularly about the Dalles, and a considerable quantity of useful lumber is made from it and sold, sometimes for eastern white oak, to wagon makers.  Kellogg’s oak is a magnificent tree and does much for the picturesque beauty of the Umpqua and Rogue River Valleys where it abounds.  It is also found in all the Yosemite valleys of the Sierra, and its acorns form an important part of the food of the Digger Indians.  In the Siskiyou Mountains there is a live oak (Q. chrysolepis), wide-spreading and very picturesque in form, but not very common.  It extends southward along the western flank of the Sierra and is there more abundant and much larger than in Oregon, oftentimes five to eight feet in diameter.