After leaving the pretty and picturesque Pasigochic, a high hill is ascended, and late that afternoon we passed the highest point between the morning and evening camps, eighteen hundred feet. On the high hills were seen the beautiful madroña tree, or strawberry tree, with blood-red bark, and bright green and yellow leaves, and covered with white blossoms, so startling a mixture of colors that it would hardly be believed if painted and put on exhibition. They were everywhere, from the merest bush in size to trees twenty and thirty feet in height. In form they are not unlike a spreading apple tree, with strongly contorted and twisted branches. Then there were many oaks of different kinds, the _encino robles_ or everlasting oak, the white oak, and the little black variety. There were a dozen kinds I knew nothing of in my limited vocabulary of forest trees. The pines were beautiful, and in many places forty to fifty merchantable trees to the acre, straight as an arrow, and without a limb for sixty or seventy feet from the ground. In one or two clusters I noticed groups of pines like those an old lumberman once pointed out to me in the forests of Oregon as good mast timber. I have seen the same repeated dozens of times on the slopes of the Sierra Madre range. This dense mass of spar and mast timber, as I shall call it, is nearly always found on the richest soil of the mountain, generally in the narrow little valleys where the silt from the sides is swept down by the rains until the soil is many feet deep. The great coniferous forest of the northern part of the Sierra Madre range of Mexico is probably one of the largest in the world (it is undoubtedly the largest virgin forest on either continent), and when its resources are opened by well-constructed wagon roads, or, better still, by a railway system, it will undoubtedly prove an enormous source of revenue to the Mexican States of Chihuahua and Sonora, and to no little extent those of Sinaloa and Durango--a source nearly as profitable as their mineral wealth, and this is saying a great deal, for these States comprise the richest silver district in the world.