Your National Parks, with Detailed Information for Tourists

by Enos A. Mills; Laurence Frederick Schmeckebier

This realm is not barren and lifeless. For a number of species it is home. The ptarmigan and the rose finch, the cony and the bighorn, live in the heights the year round. Many migrating birds and animals use the region for a nursery and a summer resort. Here, early in the autumn, Nature produces her last berries. Here assemble birds from the lowlands, and flocks from the North stop to feed and frolic while migrating to the Southland.

Here, too, along with peaks and moorlands, meadows and wild-flower gardens, are crags, plateaus, cañons, lakes, glaciers, and snow-fields. Countless small, clear streams originate in these island heights and from them start merrily down to the far-off seas. Singly and in clusters, with areas large and areas small, these sky islands are a feature of most of the National Parks.

In the Rocky Mountain National Park a few flowers bloom on the highest peaks more than fourteen thousand feet above sea-level. They are visited by numerous winged insects, even by butterflies. Let a cloud come over the sun, or a breeze start, and the butterflies, and perhaps other winged insects above timber-line, fold wings and drop and remain motionless till the sky clears. Evidently this is "safety first" from the short-lived but violent gales.

It is believed that the Arctic-alpine plants in these heights were brought to them from the Arctic region on the great ice flow. They bloom in both these zones at about the same date. Among the bright blossoms in the polar mountain-top gardens are the columbine, gentian, aster, daisy, shooting-star, bluebell, a few kinds of phlox, and that dearest of the heath blossoms, the cassiope. Numbers are dwarfed to unbelievable smallness. Think of bluebells perfectly formed and colored and yet so fascinatingly small and dainty that a half-dozen could be sheltered in the upper half of a thimble!

The alpine wild-flower garden on Mount Rainier is one of the most striking on the globe. Just above the timber-line and below and among the glaciers, colored flowers grow in tall and crowded luxuriance. They color broken distances for miles. It is doubtful if the world can show another hanging garden in which wild flowers so splendidly mingle their lovely hues with the broken picturesque forests, wild crags, and the grandeur of glaciers.

In the Rocky Mountain National Park there is an accessible empire in the mountainous sky, up more than two miles above the wide plains of the sea. Mountain-climbers pass through these scenes on their way up peaks into the sky without stopping to see the wonders. They have at best only an introduction, or a hurried traveler's impression, of a strange and varied exhibit.

A few centuries ago it was a common belief that high mountains were peopled with monsters and demons. Those demons are gone from the popular imagination; but there still exists a most unfortunate superstition, commonly believed, that altitude is harmful! Yet it has a thousand benefits for the visitor.

In the heights dwell a bigness, a strangeness, a friendliness not felt in the earth's lower scenes. Altitude is ever refreshing. The dust-filled, noise-crowded air is far below. From these scenic mountain heights one commands a new world of mountainous cloud-scenery in the sky. Grand, deep, blue gorges lie open in the cloud plateaus and mountains. To the enraptured eye the shifting clouds sometimes become continents and islands, real lands where people live, landscapes upon whose sunny hills and forested mountains shadows of other clouds fall, and across whose expanding plains many winding rivers run. Often the largeness of view enables one to see vast cloud-pieces moved into place, shifted elsewhere, and others arranged. Often a number of these movements are seen at once. Here, too, the sunrise comes grandly before one, and from these mountain-rims the painted sky of evening is most intense and vivid. Cloud and color often mingle in paintings of undreamed vastness and glory.

Up here one appreciates the solemnity and the splendor of the moonlight. The lonely silver moon appears a wandering planet, almost within hailing distance. You call, and a hundred cliffs call with you. You listen, but there is only the murmur of a far-off waterfall, or the receding, echoing crash of some falling cliff. Everything is in half-tone. The chasm is concealed; peaks along the sky-line are suggested; the valleys lie in subdued and mellow light; strangely, from the silken shadow folds, the pinnacles peer at the moon. Through the clean, clear air, the infinite sky becomes a near, inverted field, crowded thick with stars.