Upon the Sierra each tree after its kind withstood the storm. The aspens that bordered the high meadows, the alders and the willows along the streams—these had flared with autumnal yellow, and now raised against the winter storm only bare branches, skeletons upon which the snow found small lodgment.

The fir trees rose in tapering pointed cones. Their broad thick-set needles held the flakes, until the trees grew solid white. So perfect was their cover that around each trunk, beneath the shelter of down-sloping branches, was a cup in the snow, a refuge for the hard-pressed grouse and rabbits where sometimes even bare ground was showing. Beneath their loads the fir trees stood stiffly—like Puritans, prim and uncompromising—saying between tight-drawn lips, “We shall not bend, though we break.” And often they broke; the over-strained trunk, brittle in the cold, snapped like a match, and the tree lay in ruin.

Not so were the cedars. They bent easily and pliantly beneath the weight, until at last they sloughed off the snow and again stood upright.

Still different were the yellow pines. Their slender, thinly set needles let the snow slip through. On the windward side a sheathing built up on the scaly-barked trunks; white ridges lay upon the big horizontal branches of the crown. Otherwise, the trees looked almost as dark and green as in summer.

More like the cedars were the lodge-pole pines, which the people of the Sierra call tamaracks. These flourished only at the highest levels and must survive the full force of every storm. Each smaller tree caught the snow as thickly as a fir; then just as the weight was about to become crushing, the whole tree seemed to shake itself violently, and after a moment it emerged from the cloud of falling snow, again upright with only a powdering of crystals upon its needles. The mature lodge-poles cleared themselves branch by branch, loosing a few bushels of snow to drop upon the drifts beneath; in heavy stands one heard constantly the long shu-u-sh of falling snow.