I Wanted In Particular To Learn What The
Oquirrh Rocks Were Made Of, What Trees Composed The Curious Patches Of
Forest; and, perhaps more than all, I was animated by a mountaineer's
eagerness to get my feet into the snow
Once more, and my head into the
clear sky, after lying dormant all winter at the level of the sea.
But in every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks. I
had not gone more than a mile from Lake Point ere I found the way
profusely decked with flowers, mostly compositae and purple
leguminosae, a hundred corollas or more to the square yard, with a
corresponding abundance of winged blossoms above them, moths and
butterflies, the leguminosae of the insect kingdom. This floweriness
is maintained with delightful variety all the way up through rocks and
bushes to the snow - violets, lilies, gilias, oenotheras, wallflowers,
ivesias, saxifrages, smilax, and miles of blooming bushes, chiefly
azalea, honeysuckle, brier rose, buckthorn, and eriogonum, all meeting
and blending in divine accord.
Two liliaceous plants in particular, Erythronium grandiflorum and
Fritillaria pudica, are marvelously beautiful and abundant. Never
before, in all my walks, have I met so glorious a throng of these fine
showy liliaceous plants. The whole mountainside was aglow with them,
from a height of fifty-five hundred feet to the very edge of the snow.
Although remarkably fragile, both in form and in substance, they are
endowed with plenty of deep-seated vitality, enabling them to grow in
all kinds of places - down in leafy glens, in the lee of wind-beaten
ledges, and beneath the brushy tangles of azalea, and oak, and prickly
roses - everywhere forming the crowning glory of the flowers.
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