View looking west across Moraine Park and Carbon Glacier to Mother Mountains.
Copyright, 1909, By Asahel Curtis.
V.
THE FLORA OF THE MOUNTAIN SLOPES.
By PROF. J. B. FLETT.[7]
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—daisies, anemones, columbines, erythroniums, larkspurs, etc., among which 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: "Our National Parks."
No one can visit the Mountain without being impressed by its wild flowers. These are the more noticeable because of their high color—a common characteristic of flowers in alpine regions. As we visit the upland meadows at a season when the spring flowers of the lowlands have gone to seed, we find there another spring season with flowers in still greater number and more varied in color.
