Your National Parks Part 20

XIX

THE SCENERY IN THE SKY

This big round world carries in its heights four strange, marked features: the vast records of the Ice King; timber-line, the alpine edge of the forest; the mountain-top regions above timber-line; and, over-rising these, the high peaks. Each of these features has scores of stories and pictures. All four of them are seen at their best in some of the National Parks.

1. TIMBER-LINE

The most telling timber-line that I have seen is on the slope of Long's Peak in the Rocky Mountain National Park. This is a wild place during a winter gale. It is a stirring place at all times and seasons.

One day I went up to timber-line on Long's Peak with a number of children. They were interested, and even excited, by the dwarfed and strangely shaped trees. We found a dead pine that had lived two hundred and fifty-eight years, yet it was so small that a boy easily carried it about on his shoulder. Several little girls stood by a living spruce. Every child was taller than the little tree, yet the spruce had been growing when each of their great-grandmothers was born. All timber-line trees are undersized. Most of their ranks are less than eight feet high.

One autumn a grizzly that I was following dug up a number of dwarfed trees at timber-line. I carried these home for careful examination.

One of them was a black birch with a trunk nine tenths of an inch in diameter, a height of fifteen inches, and a limb-spread of twenty-two inches. It had thirty-four annual rings. Another was truly a veteran pine, though his trunk was but six tenths of an inch in diameter, his height twenty-three inches, and his limb-spread thirty-one inches. His age was sixty-seven years. A midget that I carried home in my vest pocket was two inches high, had a limb-spread of about four inches, and was twenty-eight years of age.

Timber-line is one of Nature's most interesting regions. Its location and also its marked characteristics are determined by climatic conditions--by cold, snow, wind, moisture, and drought. Wind is a most influential factor. The position of thousands of miles of timber-line is determined by it. At timber-line the Storm King says, "Thus far and no farther." The trees do not heed, but persistently try to go on, and the struggle for existence becomes deadly. They appear like our unfortunate brothers whom fate has chained in the slums. The trees try to stand erect and climb onward and upward, but in vain. The elements are relentless. The wind blows off their arms and cuts them with flying sand. The cold dwarfs them, and for nine months in the year the snow tries to twist and crush the life out of them. Some become hunchbacks; others are broken, bent, and half-flayed; while a few crouch behind the rocks. Many stretches of timber-line are so battered by the wind that the trees have the appearance of having been recently swept by a cyclone, or overthrown by a giant roller.

What a weird scene! Here for ages has been the line of battle between the woods and the weather. At most timber-lines the high winds blow chiefly from one direction. Many of the trees possess a long, vertical fringe of limbs to leeward, being limbless and barkless to stormward.

Each might serve as an impressive symbolic statue of a wind-storm.

Permanently, their limbs stream to leeward together, with fixed bends and distortions, as if cast in metal at the height of a storm. Many present an unconquerable and conscious appearance, like tattered pennants or torn, triumphant battle-flags of the victorious forest!

Some trees are several inches in diameter and only a few inches in height; others are creeping away from the direction of the storms, retreating from life's awful battle. All beauty and n.o.bleness of appearance are lost. But the trees have done their best.

Timber-line is not stationary. In most places it is advancing, climbing the heights. This advance is confined mainly to moist territory. In a few dry places the ranks are losing ground--are being driven back down the slopes; but these advances and retreats are extremely slow.

The alt.i.tude of timber-line varies with locality. On Mount Orizaba, in Mexico, it is a little over thirteen thousand feet; in the San Juan Mountains, in Colorado, a little above twelve thousand; in the Sierras and the Rockies, between eleven thousand and thirteen thousand; in the Cascades and the Alps, about sixty-five hundred feet; on Mount Washington, at forty-five hundred feet. It is lower with increased distance from the Equator, and at last is only a stone's throw above sea-level, finally showing its line in the lowlands of the Farthest North. Among the trees that maintain the front ranks at timber-line are pines, spruces, firs, aspens, birches, and willows.

Many beautiful flowers are found at timber-line, along with bees, b.u.t.terflies, birds, chipmunks, and foxes. Timber-line is a strangely interesting, arousing place. As I have said in "The Rocky Mountain Wonderland":--

The powerful impressions received at timber-line lead many visitors to return for a better acquaintance, and from each visit the visitor goes away more deeply impressed; for timber-line is not only novel and strange, it is touched with pathos and poetry and has a life-story that is heroic. Its scenes are among the most primeval, interesting, and thought-compelling to be found upon the globe.

2. ABOVE THE TIMBER-LINE

The treeless moorlands and the crags that fill the sky above the limits of tree-growth form an extensive mountain-top world all by itself, a realm of plateaus and sky prairies, which only a few have explored. These regions stand out like islands in the sky; they are singular treeless expanses above the surrounding forest sea.

This realm is not barren and lifeless. For a number of species it is home. The ptarmigan and the rose finch, the cony and the bighorn, live in the heights the year round. Many migrating birds and animals use the region for a nursery and a summer resort. Here, early in the autumn, Nature produces her last berries. Here a.s.semble birds from the lowlands, and flocks from the North stop to feed and frolic while migrating to the Southland.

Here, too, along with peaks and moorlands, meadows and wild-flower gardens, are crags, plateaus, canons, lakes, glaciers, and snow-fields. Countless small, clear streams originate in these island heights and from them start merrily down to the far-off seas. Singly and in cl.u.s.ters, with areas large and areas small, these sky islands are a feature of most of the National Parks.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ABOVE THE TIMBER-LINE IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK

Long's Peak on extreme left]

In the Rocky Mountain National Park a few flowers bloom on the highest peaks more than fourteen thousand feet above sea-level. They are visited by numerous winged insects, even by b.u.t.terflies. Let a cloud come over the sun, or a breeze start, and the b.u.t.terflies, and perhaps other winged insects above timber-line, fold wings and drop and remain motionless till the sky clears. Evidently this is "safety first" from the short-lived but violent gales.

It is believed that the Arctic-alpine plants in these heights were brought to them from the Arctic region on the great ice flow. They bloom in both these zones at about the same date. Among the bright blossoms in the polar mountain-top gardens are the columbine, gentian, aster, daisy, shooting-star, bluebell, a few kinds of phlox, and that dearest of the heath blossoms, the ca.s.siope. Numbers are dwarfed to unbelievable smallness. Think of bluebells perfectly formed and colored and yet so fascinatingly small and dainty that a half-dozen could be sheltered in the upper half of a thimble!

The alpine wild-flower garden on Mount Rainier is one of the most striking on the globe. Just above the timber-line and below and among the glaciers, colored flowers grow in tall and crowded luxuriance.

They color broken distances for miles. It is doubtful if the world can show another hanging garden in which wild flowers so splendidly mingle their lovely hues with the broken picturesque forests, wild crags, and the grandeur of glaciers.

In the Rocky Mountain National Park there is an accessible empire in the mountainous sky, up more than two miles above the wide plains of the sea. Mountain-climbers pa.s.s through these scenes on their way up peaks into the sky without stopping to see the wonders. They have at best only an introduction, or a hurried traveler's impression, of a strange and varied exhibit.

A few centuries ago it was a common belief that high mountains were peopled with monsters and demons. Those demons are gone from the popular imagination; but there still exists a most unfortunate superst.i.tion, commonly believed, that alt.i.tude is harmful! Yet it has a thousand benefits for the visitor.

In the heights dwell a bigness, a strangeness, a friendliness not felt in the earth's lower scenes. Alt.i.tude is ever refreshing. The dust-filled, noise-crowded air is far below. From these scenic mountain heights one commands a new world of mountainous cloud-scenery in the sky. Grand, deep, blue gorges lie open in the cloud plateaus and mountains. To the enraptured eye the shifting clouds sometimes become continents and islands, real lands where people live, landscapes upon whose sunny hills and forested mountains shadows of other clouds fall, and across whose expanding plains many winding rivers run. Often the largeness of view enables one to see vast cloud-pieces moved into place, shifted elsewhere, and others arranged.

Often a number of these movements are seen at once. Here, too, the sunrise comes grandly before one, and from these mountain-rims the painted sky of evening is most intense and vivid. Cloud and color often mingle in paintings of undreamed vastness and glory.

Up here one appreciates the solemnity and the splendor of the moonlight. The lonely silver moon appears a wandering planet, almost within hailing distance. You call, and a hundred cliffs call with you.

You listen, but there is only the murmur of a far-off waterfall, or the receding, echoing crash of some falling cliff. Everything is in half-tone. The chasm is concealed; peaks along the sky-line are suggested; the valleys lie in subdued and mellow light; strangely, from the silken shadow folds, the pinnacles peer at the moon. Through the clean, clear air, the infinite sky becomes a near, inverted field, crowded thick with stars.

This is a region worthy of mult.i.tudes of visitors, yet it has only a few. Most people do not dream of its existence. Some time throngs will come to these strange island sh.o.r.es in the sky as freely as now they crowd to the beach and the breakers of the sea.

3. THE WORK OF THE ICE KING

With his glaciers the Ice King ground most of the soil in which now stand the forests, the gra.s.ses, and the flowers. In producing this soil he sculptured from the solid rock of the earth much of the scenery, shaped many of the flowing landscapes, and formed the excavations in which ten thousand lakes now rest in beauty. Long ice periods have had their sway, then vanished. Most of the earth appears to have been ice-covered a number of times. Then, after ages, the ice has returned. These periods appear to have alternated with others whose climatic conditions were similar to those now holding sway. The remaining glaciers, the world over, are growing smaller and smaller.

A glacier is a slow-moving ma.s.s of ice. It may be as small as an average steamship; it may be less than a mile wide and several miles long; or it may cover hundreds of square miles. It may be less than a hundred feet, or a thousand feet or more, in thickness. It may move only an inch or two a day, or it may move several feet. Commonly it moves downward, but occasionally one moves upward. The movement is due to gravity and to the plasticity or rubbery nature of the ice when under sufficient pressure or weight. In a large glacier the weight of the superimposed icy stratum is immense; it is greater than the bottom layers can support. Under the enormous pressure the bottom layers crawl or flow from beneath like pressed dough. This forced ma.s.s moves outward in the direction of the least resistance--commonly down the slope.

Glacier ice is formed by snow acc.u.mulating at a given point more rapidly than it melts. This is due chiefly to wind, snowslides, and heavy snowfall. The glacier, heavy and powerful, planes, polishes, and reshapes the surface over which it travels, or the walls with which it comes in contact. Most of the lake-basins were gouged out by glaciers.

Mountain-ranges have been worn down to hills or plains; canons and depressions have been filled, and extensive areas overlaid with ground-up rocky material. The gentle snowflake has been the earth's chief maker of scenery and soil. Snowflakes, working _en ma.s.se_ and through long periods of time, have formed glaciers and as such have wrought wonders.

A moraine is an embankment or delta of boulders and crushed rock deposited by a glacier or ice river. Though commonly at the end, it may be both along the side and at the end of a glacier, or of the channels which the glacier once filled. All the mountainous National Parks have important glacial records or ruins that almost entirely cover them. These are moraines, soil-deposits, glaciated canons, and lake-basins.

Vast is the quant.i.ty of material picked up and transported by glaciers. Mountains are moved piecemeal, and are ground to boulders, pebbles, and rock-flour in the moving. Besides the material the glacier gathers up and excavates, it carries the wreckage thrown down upon it by landslides, and also the eroded matter poured upon it by streams from the heights. Most of the material that falls upon the top of the upper end of the glacier gradually works its way to the bottom.

At last, with the other gathered material, it is pressed against the bottom and sides and used as a cutting, rasping, or grinding tool till worn to pebbles or powder.

A part of the rocky material gathered is carried to the end of the glacier, where the melting of the ice unloads and releases it. This acc.u.mulation at the end is called the terminal moraine, and corresponds to the delta of a river. For years the bulk of the ice may melt away at about the same place; thus at this point acc.u.mulates an enormous amount of debris. An advance of the ice may plow through this and repile it, or the retreat of the ice, or a changed direction of its flow, may pile debris elsewhere. Many of these terminal moraines are an array of broken embankments with small basin-like holes and smooth, level s.p.a.ces.

Many of the lakes have been filled with sediment, and in them and on them forests now flourish. The glacier lakes were slowly created. Most of them are being slowly filled. Those most favorably situated may still live on for thousands of years, but an avalanche may extinguish one in a single day. Eventually all must be filled and lost. They come into existence as a part of the work of the glacier. For a period they lie beautiful in the sunlight; then they are gone forever.

The extensive glacial records that show the past triumphs of the Ice King sometimes make the mind restless, and it wants to know: "Will the Ice King come again? Will mountains of white and silent snow again pile upon a lifeless world?"

4. HIGH PEAKS

Those who go up into the clouds and sky on high mountains will find a variety of lofty and magnificent peaks in the National Parks. These peaks rise amid and above wildernesses of superb scenes, splendid combinations of peaks, streams, lakes, pa.s.ses, forests, and moorlands.

My three favorite peaks in the United States are Mount Rainier, Long's Peak, and the Grand Teton, which is near Jackson's Hole, Wyoming.

In many respects Mount Rainier is the n.o.blest mountain in the world.

It is high, and to reach its summit is to make a journey that requires preparation and care. Much ice work is necessary in order to attain the top. Once there, the climber looks down upon extensive landscapes of forests and sea, islands and rivers, and snowy peaks.

Long's Peak is a rugged, vast monolith of granite 14,255 feet high.

Usually it is almost entirely free of both ice and snow. It is a rock climb. It stands not in but immediately in front of the Continental Divide, whose near-by ruggedness is tremendously impressive. Far away one looks out over seas of mountains and on ocean plains. Standing side by side with Long's Peak, and of almost equal height, is Mount Meeker, also a rock climb that reveals scenes of unusual interest.