Growing far up the slopes is an attractive member of the dock family that is tufted with purplish-yellow bloom. A yellow mustard (Draba aureola) and another member of the mustard family with creamy-white flowers carry and maintain this wonderful wild-flower garden farthest above the clouds, highest up into the snow-fields and the sky.
One day I found a tiny tuft of bloom in a bit of soil on the very summit of Rainier. It was in a niche of lava, surrounded with ice and snow, but warmed by the steadily escaping steam. Brave, cheerful little fellow creature! In a steamy, ice-rimmed volcano's throat on a desolate top of the world!
Of all the fire-mountains which, like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest in form.... Its massive white dome rises out of its forests, like a world by itself.... Above the forests there is a zone of the loveliest flowers, fifty miles in circuit and nearly two miles wide, so closely planted and luxuriant that it seems as if Nature, glad to make an open space between woods so dense and ice so deep, were economizing the precious ground, and trying to see how many of her darlings she can get together in one mountain wreath.... We wade knee-deep and waist-deep, the bright corollas in myriads touching petal to petal.... Altogether this is the richest subalpine garden I ever found, a perfect floral elysium. (John Muir, in "Our National Parks.")
The forests of this park are a splendid attraction. The trees are tall and of noble proportions. The forest floor has a tangled undergrowth of vines and shrubbery, a luxuriant carpet of ferns, mosses, and flowers. Many areas are crowded with trees from two to eight feet in diameter, from one hundred to two hundred and fifty feet high. Cedars, spruces, and hemlocks number their years by centuries. A few are perhaps a thousand years of age. Theodore Winthrop wrote of these forests:—
Long years of labor by artists the most unconscious of their skill had been given to modelling these columnar firs. Unlike the pillars of human architecture, chipped and chiselled in bustling, dusty quarries, and hoisted to their site by sweat of brow and creak of pulley, these rose to fairest proportions by the life that was in them and blossomed into foliated capitals three hundred feet overhead.
The forest is gloomy with luxuriant greenness. Many trees are shrouded with a pendent lichen, Usnea. This hangs in long, threadlike tufts, while beneath it, mingling with the flowers among the towering trees, are forests of far-spreading ferns.
Around the foot of the mountain are the Indian-pipe and the pyrola, of the wintergreen family; and there is still another delightful member of this family, whose generic name means "delight." The dogwood (Cornus canadensis), the forest anemone, the dainty calypso are also here. All these and numbers of other brilliantly colored species brighten and in places illuminate the somber forest floor like touches and dashes of sunlight.
On the lower slopes Douglas spruce and Western hemlock predominate, with red cedar along the streams. Above the altitude of three thousand feet, noble and silver firs are found singly and in solid groves. Ascending, we find a scattered growth of lodge-pole, growths of Engelmann spruce, and a few white-bark pines.
The timber-line may be given as about sixty-five hundred feet, or at the same altitude as in the Alps. The extreme height of the tree growth is about one thousand feet greater. Most of the timber-line growth is crushed, flattened, and oppressed. The timber-line grouping is most poetical and picturesque. In places the trees are both dwarfed and distorted with wind and snow. The trees are mountain hemlock, alpine fir, Engelmann spruce, and white-bark pine. These stand singly, in groups, and in ragged groves. Commonly they stand in green meadows or brilliant wild-flower gardens. Here and there they are separated with the green tracks of permanent snowslides.
The Mount Rainier National Park has its full share of bird and animal life. Here are numerous warblers and woodpeckers; chickadees, black-hooded jays, dainty hummingbirds, ptarmigans, thrushes, and trustful water-ouzels.