A "Burn" on the slopes of Mount Hood, overgrown with Squaw Grass. Such fire-swept areas are quickly covered with mountain flowers, of which this beautiful cream-colored plume is one of the most familiar. Its roots yield a fiber used by the Indians in making baskets.
COPYRIGHT, GIFFORD
In valley woodlands, the dogwood, here a tree of fair proportions, lights up the somber forest with round, white eyes that peer out through bursting leafbuds, early harbingers of summer. The first blush of color comes with the unfolding of the pink and red racemes of flowering wild currant. Later, sweet syringa fills the air with the breath of orange blossoms; and spirea, the Indian arrowwood, hangs its tassels among the forest trees or on the bushy hills. But the presence of deciduous trees and shrubs, as well as their beauty, is best known in autumn, when maples brighten the woods with yellow rays; when dogwood and vine maple paint the fire-scarred slopes a flaming red, and a host of other color-bearers stain the cliffs with rich tints of saffron and russet and brown.
Coming at last to the rim of the forest, you look out over the sea, where go lumber-laden ships to all the world. Close by the beach, dwarfed and distorted by winds of the ocean, and nourished by its fogs, north-coast pine (Pinus contorta) extends its prostrate forms over the cliffs and dunes of the shore, just as your first acquaintance, the white-bark pine, spreads over the dunes and ridges of the mountain. They are brothers of a noble race.
Western White Pine.
You have traversed the wonder-forest of the world, and on your journey with the stream you may have come to know twenty-three species of cone-bearers, all indigenous to the Columbia country. Of these, one is Douglas fir, nowise a true fir but a combination of spruce and hemlock; seven are pines, four true firs, two spruces, two hemlocks, two tamaracks or larches, two cedars, two junipers, and the yew.
A Clatsop Forest. On extreme right is a Silver Fir, covered with moss; next are two fine Hemlocks, with Tideland Spruce on left.