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.
This is a region worthy of multitudes of visitors, yet it has only a
few. Most people do not dream of its existence. Some time throngs
will come to these strange island shores in the sky as freely as now
they crowd to the beach and the breakers of the sea.