842 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



sachs of vScotland, or Lake Country of 

 Italy. Of battlefields, there are more 

 than enough; but only a few are as 

 much as marked; and I doubt if any 

 guide book exists to pilot the tourists to 

 those few. In Florida, on the inner 

 coast of the Gulf, at Galveston, from 

 Monterey to Santa Barbara — are Ameri- 

 can Mediterraneans; and from Grand 

 Canyon to the Canadian Rockies lies a 

 succession of Switzerlands practically 

 unexplored. 



The great mountain playgrounds lie 

 for the most part within the bounds of 

 the National Forests. There are six 

 distinct belts of as different a character 

 as the Dolomites of Austria from the 

 Trossachs of Scotland; and it would be 

 just about as sensible to attempt to do 

 all the mountain resorts of Europe in 

 one season as all the mountain play- 

 grounds of America. 



Begin at the South! There is the 

 Grand Canyon Painted Desert region — ■ 

 though it will be news to the most of 

 Americans to know that chains of 

 mountains high as the Rockies lie 

 sunken in the abysmal gorge of the 

 Canyon and that snow peaks loom opal- 

 escent above the lavender mists of the 

 Desert. 



North of the Painted Desert come the 

 mountains of Estes Park and Colorado 

 — high park-like areas of Englemann 

 spruce with turquoise lakes Tying in 

 alpine meadows and a rush of angry 

 waters coming down from the snowy* 

 peaks. In fact, on one railroad in Colo- 

 rado you can lunch in a snow shed 

 11,000 feet above sea level and play 

 snow ball in mid-August. 



Westward are the Sierra groups of 

 mountain resorts — Hetch-Hetchy and 

 the Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove 

 — all made famous by Muir's pen, and 

 yet more famous by their exquisite 

 beauty and remote aloof grandeur — as 

 of a still isolated sacred world. 



Yet northward come three more 

 mountain playgrounds — Ranier, Glacier 

 National Park, and the Canadian Rock- 

 ies — all distinguished by similar char- 

 acteristics — dense forests of pine and 

 hemlock, enormous fields of glacial ice 

 and snow — I have tramped some of 

 these fields twenty-five miles without 



leaving snow — and lofty pinnacled 

 peaks, with a roar of mountain torrents, 

 down from the eternal ice and snow to 

 wild gorges where the mad plunge of 

 the water has literally torn a path 

 through the solid rock. The phrase 

 "eternal ice and snow" is not jnetaphor. 

 It is literal. On Mount Ranier, in the 

 Illecillewaet and Asulkan Valleys, down 

 the back of Cathedral Peak, lie snow and 

 ice that date from the ice age. Round 

 the Valley of the Ten Peaks, or Moraine 

 Lake, you can ascend glaciers and glac- 

 ial moraine, where you can literally 

 count the years and the decades of years 

 back the centuries like the rungs of an 

 ascending ladder, from the ledges or 

 circles of ice pack and snow pack. That 

 is — the year's snow fall of fifteen or 

 twenty feet packs and thaws into a solid 

 layer, distinguished from the preceding 

 year by its silt of pulverized rock and 

 atmospheric dust. Between two of the 

 Ten Peaks you can climb a glacier for 

 three miles where the year's snow fall 

 lies like steps of a stair. Similar ledges 

 of ice are observable on the glacier 

 below Mt. Victoria — that white wall of 

 alabaster that stretches for twelve miles 

 between sky and earth above the won- 

 derful peacock blue lake at Laggan. 

 Where the train dives into a snow shed 

 in the Canadian Rockies, or in Colorado, 

 and one comes out to see huge mountain 

 slopes swept clear as by a mighty broom 

 — the force and terrible swiftness of the 

 avalanche seem near; but at Lake 

 Louise, Laggan, you can sit in your 

 bedroom and see the snow slides slip 

 over the white ledges of Mt. Victoria 

 like tenuous wind-blown falls; and 

 never realize that you are watching an 

 avalanche till you hear the far boom of 

 the fall like thunder. It does not need 

 to be told here — that glaciers are not 

 advancing but receding — an inch or 

 two a year — like the foot of an icy 

 ancient drawing back from modern 

 days. Nor need it be told here that 

 you can always tell the character of 

 the Upper Alpine Country by the color 

 of the mountain streams below. Streams 

 from a glacier are milky from the silt 

 worn off the under rocks by the grind 

 of the centuries' ice. The silt often— 

 as in the Big Bend of the Columbia — 

 imparts an almost vitriol greenish blue. 



