GLACIER PARK WILD FLOWERS 93 



climbing Piegan Pass, for instance, which takes you 

 close under the more than 10,000-foot summit of Mount 

 Siyeh. You have left timber far behind, and are crawl- 

 ing up beside a yawning canon hole, amid naked, broken 

 shale, desolate beyond words or the pencil. of Dore. 

 Yet look at the ground close beside you! It is not 

 naked. In every sheltered cranny, in every spot where 

 a mite of soil has lodged, flowers are blooming! Some 

 of them are so tiny that it would require a microscope to 

 analyze them. Some, you note with surprise, are of the 

 lowland varieties, dwarfed by the summit storms like a 

 timber-line tree. I found a shrubby cinquefoil at al- 

 most 9,000 feet, with a stalk as large as my thumb and 

 tough as steel; but it grew as close along the ground as a 

 Mitchella vine, literally hugging the earth, and wasn't 

 more than a foot long. Yet it was bearing blossoms 

 quite as large as in its natural position. Here on the 

 wind-swept uplands the true forget-me-not grows, this 

 mountain variety being as a rule not more than six 

 inches high, but of a marvellous cerulean blue. Here are 

 various gentians, from true gentian blue through pinky 

 purple to almost white. Here, too, are found the blue 

 Greek valerians, fragrant, thick, bloom clusters on hairy 

 stems, and a still more attractive and showy plant, the 

 mountain phacelia. This phacelia sends up bluish- 

 purple bloom-spikes, on which the flowers cluster 

 thickly in a panicle, with their golden stamens pro- 

 jecting beyond the petal trumpet giving them a 



