Goldenrods, Asters, Gilias, Lilies, And Lupines, With Many
Other Less Conspicuous Plants, Occur In Warm Sheltered Openings In
These Lower Woods, Making Charming Gardens Of Wildness Where Bees And
Butterflies Are At Home And Many A Shy Bird And Squirrel.
The next higher is the Fir Zone, made up almost exclusively of two
species of silver fir.
It is from two to three miles wide, has an
average elevation above the sea of some six thousand feet on its lower
edge and eight thousand on its upper, and is the most regular and best
defined of the three.
The Alpine Zone has a rugged, straggling growth of storm-beaten dwarf
pines (Pinus albicaulis), which forms the upper edge of the
timberline. This species reaches an elevation of about nine thousand
feet, but at this height the tops of the trees rise only a few feet
into the thin frosty air, and are closely pressed and shorn by wind
and snow; yet they hold on bravely and put forth an abundance of
beautiful purple flowers and produce cones and seeds. Down towards
the edge of the fir belt they stand erect, forming small, well-formed
trunks, and are associated with the taller two-leafed and mountain
pines and the beautiful Williamson spruce. Bryanthus, a beautiful
flowering heathwort, flourishes a few hundred feet above the
timberline, accompanied with kalmia and spiraea. Lichens enliven the
faces of the cliffs with their bright colors, and in some of the
warmer nooks of the rocks, up to a height of eleven thousand feet,
there are a few tufts of dwarf daisies, wallflowers, and penstemons;
but, notwithstanding these bloom freely, they make no appreciable show
at a distance, and the stretches of rough brown lava beyond the storm-beaten trees seem as bare of vegetation as the great snow fields and
glaciers of the summit.
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