88 A. G. Tansley. 
neat little houses with beautifully kept vividly green grass and gay 
flower beds, contrasted strikingly with vacant lots of waste land 
not yet taken up, and great stretches of well-tended orchard. 
Unfortunately there was no time to see the primitive sage-brush 
land, of which none is now left in the immediate neighbourhood 
of the town. The peaches were ripe and were much appreciated 
by the members of the party. 
North-western Coniferous Forests. 
North Yakima was left about midday, and during the journey 
to Tacoma (160 miles) the Cascade Mountains were crossed, an 
important range running north and south parallel to, and about 100 
miles from, the Pacific coast, extending from British Columbia 
southward for several hundred miles to the southern limit of Oregon, 
where they become continuous with the Sierra Nevada. The 
Cascade range has several isolated peaks rising above 14,000 feet, 
of which the chief is Mount Rainier, whose snow-covered summit 
was seen to the south from the train. The ridge was crossed 
through Stampede Tunnel two miles long at 2,810 feet, the over- 
lying pass having an elevation of 3,980 feet. The Cascades form a 
very important barrier between the western coastal region of high 
rainfall (131 inches is reached in some places) and the arid region 
to the east through which we had been travelling and in which the 
rainfall is generally considerably below 20 inches and may be as low 
as 7 inches in the year. This striking climatic difference is of course 
reflected in the vegetation. As the ridge is ascended from the east 
the sage-brush vegetation gradually gives place to Pinns ponderosa, 
which increases in numbers and is itself replaced by Douglas fir 
(Pseudotsuga mucronata) associated with Thuja gigautea (plicata) 
and 7'suga heterophylla. 
Thus we entered the wet north-western conifer region of which 
the Douglas fir is the typical dominant. Its growth here is immensely 
more luxuriant than in the Rockies, and it is associated with other 
species, both of trees and of ground-vegetation, though some of the 
Rocky Mountains species are still present. Much of this area has 
been cut over and burned, and is now a wilderness of charred 
stumps and weeds which have replaced the once magnificent forest. 
The forests on the watershed are, however, National Forests, in the 
hands of the Federal Government, and these are leased to contractors 
who fell the timber under the direction of the Government foresters, 
provision being made for proper regeneration. The forest lands in the 
hands of private lumber companies are completely cleared of timber 
