The
Blue Geranium, With Leaves Red And Showy At This Time Of The Year, Is
Perhaps The Most Telling Of The Flowering Plants.
It grows up to five
thousand feet or more.
Larkspurs are common, with epilobium, senecio,
erigeron, and a few solidagos. The harebell appears at about four
thousand feet and extends to the summit, dwarfing in stature but
maintaining the size of its handsome bells until they seem to be
lying loose and detached on the ground as if like snow flowers they
had fallen from the sky; and, though frail and delicate-looking, none
of its companions is more enduring or rings out the praises of
beauty-loving Nature in tones more appreciable to mortals, not
forgetting even Cassiope, who also is here, and her companion,
Bryanthus, the loveliest and most widely distributed of the alpine
shrubs. Then come crowberry, and two species of huckleberry, one of
them from about six inches to a foot high with delicious berries, the
other a most lavishly prolific and contented-looking dwarf, few of
the bushes being more than two inches high, counting to the topmost
leaf, yet each bearing from ten to twenty or more large berries.
Perhaps more than half the bulk of the whole plant is fruit, the
largest and finest-flavored of all the huckleberries or blueberries I
ever tasted, spreading fine feasts for the grouse and ptarmigan and
many others of Nature's mountain people. I noticed three species of
dwarf willows, one with narrow leaves, growing at the very summit of
the mountain in cracks of the rocks, as well as on patches of soil,
another with large, smooth leaves now turning yellow. The third
species grows between the others as to elevation; its leaves, then
orange-colored, are strikingly pitted and reticulated. Another alpine
shrub, a species of sericocarpus, covered with handsome heads of
feathery achenia, beautiful dwarf echiverias with flocks of purple
flowers pricked into their bright grass-green, cushion-like bosses of
moss-like foliage, and a fine forget-me-not reach to the summit. I
may also mention a large mertensia, a fine anemone, a veratrum, six
feet high, a large blue daisy, growing up to three to four thousand
feet, and at the summit a dwarf species, with dusky, hairy
involucres, and a few ferns, aspidium, gymnogramma, and small rock
cheilanthes, leaving scarce a foot of ground bare, though the
mountain looks bald and brown in the distance like those of the
desert ranges of the Great Basin in Utah and Nevada.
Charmed with these plant people, I had almost forgotten to watch the
sky until I reached the top of the highest peak, when one of the
greatest and most impressively sublime of all the mountain views I
have ever enjoyed came full in sight - more than three hundred miles
of closely packed peaks of the great Coast Range, sculptured in the
boldest manner imaginable, their naked tops and dividing ridges dark
in color, their sides and the canyons, gorges, and valleys between
them loaded with glaciers and snow.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 47 of 163
Words from 24437 to 24946
of 85542
