The triumphant glory of Mount Rainier National Park is seen in its
wild flowers. It is doubtful whether anywhere else on earth is to be
found so extensive and luxuriant a growth of such brightly colored
flowers amid such scenes of supreme wildness and grandeur.
A vast broken flower-belt encircles the peak between the ragged lower
edge of the large ice-fields and the ragged upper limits of tree
growth. A flower-belt fifty miles long, covered and crowded with
flowers, mile after mile! It is most showy and splendid at and just
above the limits of tree growth. Masses of color; myriads of blossoms,
each of clean and vivid hue! This vast and splendid garden is crossed
with streams and cañons, adorned with crags, green meadows, forested
peninsulas, and islands of groves. This encircling flower carnival
expands into numerous connected and disconnected alpine parks. Each
park is a superb flower-garden with a splendid precipitous alpine
back- and sky-ground. Among the more striking of these are Paradise
Park, Indian Henry's Hunting Grounds, Spray Park, and Summerland.
In the open upper reaches of the forest, the fragrant twin-flower
covers and crowds wide places. There are thousands of cream-white
mountain lilies--bear-grass--with tall, slender blooms. The
shooting-star, a near relative of the cyclamen, is as thick upon the
earth as stars up in the sky. Thousands of purple asters are found
upon stalks two feet high. A dogtooth violet, commonly called
avalanche lily, is abundant. The western anemone, with its exquisite
leaves, its purple bloom and decorative seed plumes, adorns many a
wild garden. Many of the plants in the high altitude grow rapidly,
bloom briefly, and seed quickly. Summer is short.
Acres of valerian with four-foot stalks thrust their pungent blooms
beneath one's nose. The blue mertensia crowds moist places with a
thicket of stalks three feet high. A lavender-colored arctic lupine
grows in decorative masses. The white dock, sometimes called wild
buckwheat, nods on its slender stalks two feet above the earth. The
wild hellebore carries its greenish-white flowers upon stalks as high
as one's head.
[Illustration: MOUNT RAINIER FROM PARADISE VALLEY]
Many of the yellow or golden flowers bloom close to the earth. There
are golden asters and golden-rods, a mountain dandelion, a
low-growing yellow buttercup called the monkey-flower, the
gold-touched arnica, and yellow potentilla. These fill many wide,
ragged places with a blaze of yellow glory.
Low-growing lavender-colored phlox appears in masses, and Cusick's
speedwell forms large patches of low-lying blue. Epilobiums cover
acres of earth with pink petals.
A species of blue gentian grows in showy clusters, and meadows are
filled with the brightest painted-cups in red and crimson. The
heather, the heather! There are rich, deep masses of red, white, and
yellow heather. The white heather is the lovely cassiope that adorns
the snow edges of thousands of mountains from Mexico to the Arctic
regions.
Endless are the ranks of the saxifrage family in white; countless the
numbers of the pink family. Here the spring beauty blooms in summer
and the rose-crimson _Pentstemon rupicola_ makes a showy appearance.
Also above the limits of tree growth are other little plant people:
the ever-cheerful kinnikinnick; a dainty, tiny fern; numerous members
of the figwort family; Lyall's lupine, with its brilliant bloom of
purple flowers; the evening-primrose; and a most pungent polemonium.
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.
Among the animals is that audacious climber, the mountain goat. There
also are deer, elk, bears, and other alert wild folk.