166 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



the higher meadows slope considerably, from 

 the amount of loose material washed into their 

 basins ; and sedges and rushes are mixed with 

 the grasses or take their places, though all are 

 still more or less flowery and bordered with 

 heathworts, sibbaldea, and dwarf willows. Here 

 and there you come to small bogs, the wettest 

 smooth and adorned with parnassia and butter- 

 cups, others tussocky and ruffled like bits of 

 Arctic tundra, their mosses and lichens inter- 

 woven with dwarf shrubs. On boulder piles the 

 red iridescent oxyria abounds, and on sandy, 

 gravelly slopes several species of shrubby, yel- 

 low-flowered eriogonum, some of the plants, less 

 than a foot high, being very old, a century or 

 more, as is shown by the rings made by the 

 annual whorls of leaves on the big roots. Above 

 these flower-dotted slopes the gray, savage wil- 

 derness of crags and peaks seems lifeless and bare. 

 Yet all the way up to the tops of the highest 

 mountains, commonly supposed to be covered 

 with eternal snow, there are bright garden spots 

 crowded with flowers, their warm colors calling 

 to mind the sparks and jets of fire on polar vol- 

 canoes rising above a world of ice. The princi- 

 pal mountain-top plants are phloxes, drabas, 

 saxifrages, silene, cymopterus, hulsea, and pole- 

 monium, growing in detached stripes and mats, 

 — the highest streaks and splashes of the sum- 

 mer wave as it breaks against these wintry 



