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Will you look at this California red fir?

I just about wept looking at it: for the beauty of those curving needles, as graceful as dancers; from the desire to spend lots of time with them and try to put some of that beauty on paper; and from exhaustion. I don’t know why I should be so tired at 8:30 pm, but I am, and tomorrow is an early-rising morning despite its being Saturday. I just can’t spend an hour drawing.

So I tried to make it simple. Maybe I will come back to these needles one day. And I’ll keep an eye out for the well-named Abies magnifica in the wild. It’s not so common here by the coast, but it grows abundantly in Yosemite and all along the western slopes of the Sierras, the guide tells me.

Native but rare. The “weeping spruce” grows near the treeline in the Siskiyou Mountains, and the droop of its branches protects them from breaking under the heavy snows of these high elevations (3300-7500′).