Just back of the Mission Dolores, on the southern boundary of the city of San Francisco, they rise from low hills into minor mountains, and are known as the Bernal Heights, and Mission Mountains. Farther southward they increase in height, and become clothed in forest. Twenty miles south of San Francisco they form a majestic sierra, and thence, for some distance, are designated as the Sierra Morena. Still farther south they are known as the Coast Range of Santa Cruz, and farther yet as the Gabilan Mountains. Along this range, in San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties, is one of the largest, if not the largest, of the redwood forests of California. This forest-belt is from ten to twenty miles in width from east to west, and from thirty to forty miles in length from north to south, and contains timber enough to build twenty San Franciscos. The redwoods nowhere come down to the Pacific coast, and the traveler on the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad catches so few glimpses of them that he would never dream of the existence of such a forest; while from the decks of passing steamers one sees only small patches of them in the canons, miles back in the interior. The giant redwood—to which family the big trees of Tuolumne, Calaveras, and Mariposa Counties belong—flourishes best at a hiorh elevation and in a warm, moist atmosphere. This great forest, like that of Mendocino, crowns the mountains with tropical luxuriance, and is watered by the mists which, rising for a considerable part of the year from the bosom of the Pacific, are driven inland by the trade-winds and condensed on the mountain
