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A. G. Tansley. 
regeneration vanishes. The derelict land left after these repeated 
burnings is covered with great stretches of weeds, and presents an 
indescribable appearance of waste, ruin and desolation, which 
considerably depressed various European members of the party. 
On leaving Kapowsin the train was taken up country as far as 
Ashford, through the splendid canyon of the Nisqually River, whose 
sides are still largely covered with fine Douglas forest. Much of 
this country too has been devastated by the lumbermen. We were 
told that even so recently as 1900 the ride from near Tacoma up to 
Mount Rainier was through untouched Douglas forest all the way, 
with but a few insignificant clearings at intervals. 
From Ashford the automobile journey up to the National Park 
Inn at Longmire’s Springs is partly through the Rainier National 
Forest and mostly within the Mount Rainier National Park. In a 
National Forest lumbering is carried on by private individuals or 
companies under the direction of the Government foresters, but a 
National Park is a real nature-reserve in which nothing is allowed to 
be touched except by special permit. The great National Parks of the 
west, of which the Yellowstone and the Yosemite are the most 
widely known examples, form one of the possessions of which the 
United States may most justly be proud. Three of them were 
visited by the international party in the course of their travels. 
The lower part of the Mount Rainier Park is covered with 
typical and often very fine Douglas forest, though scarcely so fine 
as the Douglas forest of the lower hills near the coast, which, being 
in private hands, has already almost disappeared. The dominant 
Douglas fir is often very pure, and the vegetation is of the same 
general type as that seen in the unfelled forest near the lumber camp 
already described. The trees, considering their immense size, grow 
pretty close together and the shade is very deep. Huge fallen logs 
lie prostrate in all directions, so that rapid progress through the 
forest is difficult. Tsuga heterophylla , much more tolerant of shade 
than Pseudotsuga and so regenerating freely in the Douglas woods, 
Thuja plicata, also tolerant of shade, Abies gvandis and Picea 
sitchensis, enter into the composition of the forest in various 
proportions. At about 300 years of age, according to Mr. Munger 
a Government forester who was with the party in the Rainier 
forests, Douglas fir begins to suffer, and as the tree does not 
reproduce itself under its own shade it gradually gives place to 
Tsuga and Thuja. On this view a Tsuga-Thuja forest is the ultimate 
type in this area, and there would be no pure Douglas stands if it 
were not for the forest fires which allow the succession to begin 
