WHERE GLACIERS FEED THE APPLE ROOTS 81 



above that level, and the trail entered a belt of hard- 

 woods, thin, close-growing, and rather naked trees, many 

 of them winter killed and leaning against their up- 

 standing brothers or fallen like barricades across the 

 path. The Pass itself is merely the lowest point on the 

 summit ridge, a col between two rock pyramids. It 

 was not till we were almost cresting this col, at con- 

 siderably more than 7,000 feet, that the wild, tortured, 

 low-growing outpost trees of the true timber line ap- 

 peared, and the true Alpine flowers in the sheltered cran- 

 nies. The tortured trees of timber line! Nothing in 

 nature, perhaps, is wilder and more thrilling. I have 

 cut a mountain fir no higher than my knee which num- 

 bered fifty summers. I have walked on a trunk half as 

 large as my body, which rose two feet from under the 

 shelter of a rock, met the stinging storm blasts, and bent 

 out flat parallel to the ground and grew thus for fifty 

 feet, as though some giant steam roller had passed over 

 it. You climb through thinning and dwarfing forests, 

 with an ever-larger prospect opening out below you, 

 you reach the heroic outposts of the trees, you inhale a 

 colder, clearer air, you feel the breath of the snow, you 

 see at last above you only the final heave of naked rock 

 and the vast dome of the sky! 



And here, at last, where the forest gave up the fight as 

 it caught the full strength of the shearing wind, we 

 looked into the forest world beyond the Pass, the goal of 

 the Indians who first made the trail. We looked across 



