146 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



handsome blue-flowered mats and rugs on warm 

 ridges beneath the pines, and offer delightful 

 beds to the tired mountaineers. The common- 

 est species, C. cordulatus, is mostly restricted to 

 the silver fir belt. It is white-flowered and 

 thorny, and makes extensive thickets of tangled 

 chaparral, far too dense to wade through, and 

 too deep and loose to walk on, though it is 

 pressed flat every winter by ten or fifteen feet of 

 snow. 



Above these thorny beds, sometimes mixed 

 with them, a very wild, red-fruited cherry grows 

 in magnificent tangles, fragrant and white as 

 snow when in bloom. The fruit is small and 

 rather bitter, not so good as the black, puckery 

 chokecherry that grows in the canons, but 

 thrushes, robins, chipmunks like it. Below the 

 cherry tangles, chinquapin and goldcup oak 

 spread generous mantles of chaparral, and with 

 hazel and ribes thickets in adjacent glens help 

 to clothe and adorn the rocky wilderness, and 

 produce food for the many mouths Nature has 

 to fill. Azalea occidentalis is the glory of cool 

 streams and meadows. It is from two to five feet 

 high, has bright green leaves and a rich profu- 

 sion of large, fragrant white and yellow flowers, 

 which are in prime beauty in June, July, and 

 August, according to the elevation (from three 

 thousand to six thousand feet.) Only the pur- 

 ple-flowered rhododendron of the redwood for- 



