Leaves 4-angled, rigid, short-pointed, pale blue-green, 1′—1½′ long. Flowers: male short-oblong; female ovoid-oblong, with dark red or occasionally pale yellow-green scales and dark purple bracts abruptly contracted into elongated slender tips. Fruit ovoid, rather acute, 1½′—2′ long, subsessile or raised on a slender stalk coated with hoary tomentum, with dark reddish purple or rarely green erose scales, fringed and covered on their lower surface with matted hairs at maturity spreading nearly at right angles and finally much reflexed, much shorter than their dark purple very conspicuous long-tipped bracts; seeds full and rounded on the sides, ⅛′ long and about half as long as their light red lustrous wings broadest near the base with nearly parallel sides. A tree, usually 25°—50° high, with a trunk generally 18′—20′ but rarely 3°—4° in diameter, and remote elongated exceedingly tough persistent branches sometimes pendulous, developing very irregularly and often abruptly ascending at the extremities, stout branchlets coated with hoary tomentum usually persistent until after their second winter, ultimately becoming nearly black, and prominent winter-buds with conspicuous long white matted hairs fringing the margins of their scales and often almost entirely covering the bud. Bark of young trees and of the branches thin, rather lustrous, smooth, and pale gray tinged with yellow, becoming loose and scaly on larger stems and on the large branches of old trees, and on fully grown trunks ½′—¾′ thick and slightly divided by shallow fissures into irregularly shaped plates covered by thin dark-red brown loosely attached scales. Wood heavy, hard, coarse-grained, light reddish brown. Distribution. Near the timber-line on mountain slopes at elevations of 4000°—8000°, from southern Alberta on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and from the interior of southern British Columbia, southward along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains of northern Washington to Mt. Stewart at the head of the north fork of the Yakima River, and along the continental divide to the middle fork of Sun River, Montana, forming here a forest of considerable size at elevations of 7000°—8000°, and on the Bitter Root Mountains to the headwaters of the south fork of the Clearwater River, Idaho. 3. PICEA Dietr. Spruce.