Bee-Pastures of California In Two Parts.:-II''

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1882
• Subjects: Environmentalist; naturalist; travel; conservation; national parks; John Muir; history; pamphlets; journal articles; speeches; writing; annotation; Arctic; Gar’
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/195; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmb/article/1194/viewcontent/146.pdf

THE BEE-PASTURES OF CALIFORNIA. IN TWO PARTS: II. IN THE SAN GABRIEL VALLEY.—WHITE SAGE. Regarding Mount Shasta comprehensively torrid plain deep into the. cold azure, we find from a bee point of view, encircled by its the first five thousand feet from the. summit many climates, and sweeping aloft from the pretty generally snow-clad, and therefore are about as flowerless 3tA honeyless as the sea. The Jc of this arctic region is I jpniled by a belt of naked la'va swastiring about a thousand feet 9 vertical breadth. Beautiful Sdiens enliven the faces of the efiffs with their bright colors, vtA in some of the warmer aooks of the rocks there are a fc-w tufts of alpine daisies, wall- Sowers, and pentstemons; but, notwithstanding these bloom freely in the late summer, the zone as a whole is jlmost as honeyless as the icy summit, and its lower edge suy be taken as the superior limit of the honey-line. Immediately below this comes the forest zone, covered *ith a rich growth of conifers, chiefly silver firs, rich in Jwllen and honey-dew, and diversified with countless gar- ji openings, many of them less than a hundred yards *ss. Next, in orderly succession, comes the grand bee- ine. Its area far surpasses that of the icy summit and w the other zones combined, for it goes sweeping jesttcally around the entire mountain, with a breadth w six or'seven miles and a circumference of nearly a hundred miles. .Shasta, as we have already suggested, is a fire-mount- airi, created by a succession of eruptions of ashes and Molten lava, which, flowing over the lips of its several craters, grew outward and upward like the trunk of a knotty exogenous tree. Then followed a strange contrast. e glacial winter came on, loading the cooling mountain *Mh ice which flowed slowly outward in every direction, radiating from the summit in the form of One vast conical l BEE-RANCH ON A SPUR OF THE SAN GABRIEL RANGE. CARDINAL FLOWER. WILD BUCKWHEAT.—A BEE-RANCH IN THE WILDERNESS. glacier—-a down-crawling mantle of ice upon a fountain of smoldering ...