68 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



the desert was no more. Acre after acre blossomed and 

 bore fruit, towns sprang up, the smoke of homes as- 

 cended from the midst of each ten-acre square of green 

 trees and alfalfa which now covered the floor of the 

 valley like a vast checkerboard. There, where the 

 oldest orchard boasts but a scant thirty years, its trees 

 so far as age is concerned but mere striplings beside the 

 orchards of New England though in actual growth the 

 disparity is hardly apparent, thanks to the tremendous 

 fertility of volcanic ash and humus is now a new in- 

 dustry, a new community of agricultural pioneers who 

 have made the apple a work of art. 



They have done it with the aid of the mountain 

 snows, with the aid of the mountain barrier which keeps 

 off the killing winds of Winter, which guards from frost, 

 which seems to concentrate the long summer sunshine, 

 above all with the aid of the volcanic ash once belched 

 from Baker and Tacoma (or Rainier), from Glacier Peak 

 and Adams, no doubt from the vast mountain which 

 ages long ago towered 20,000 feet over the hole which 

 now holds Crater Lake in Oregon. It is no wonder that 

 the pioneers of Wenatchee and the Columbia River 

 fruit bottoms lift up their eyes unto the hills and look 

 with affection on the blue and white pyramids against 

 the west. 



Their towns are not yet beautiful; they are rawly 

 new, and it takes some time to span a street with arch- 

 ing foliage, even when you are blest with five per cent. 



