The Rocky Mountain Wonderland

Numerous moraines, terraces, steppes, and moorlands—the wide sky plains—have their soil, and this in the warmth of summer generously produces green grass and brilliant flowers. These, together with big game, birds, and circling butterflies, people this zone with life and turn the towering and terraced heights into the rarest of hanging wild gardens. In favored places for a mile or so above timber-line are scattered acres of heathy growths. Stunted by cold, clipped off by the wind, and heavily pressed by the snow, these growths are thickly tangled, bristly, and rarely more than a few inches in height. Among these are wintergreen, bunchberry, huckleberry, kalmia, currant, black birch, and arctic willow. There are miles of moorlands covered with short, thin grasses, while deeply soil-covered terraces, cozy slopes, and wet meadows have plushy grass carpets several inches thick. These growths form the basic food-supply of both the insects and the warm-blooded life of the heights.

These alpine pastures are the home of many mountain sheep. Between Long's Peak and Mt. Meeker there is a shattered shoulder of granite that is fourteen thousand feet above sea-level and at all times partly covered with an ancient snow-field, the remains of a former glacier. During earlier years I occasionally used the sky-line by this snow-field for a view-point and a lingering-place. One day after a long outlook, I emerged from between two blocks of granite and surprised a flock of mountain sheep near by. A majority of them were lying comfortably among the stones. One was nosing about, another was scratching his side with his hind hoof, while the patriarchal ram was poised on a huge block of granite. He, too, was looking down upon the world, but he was also scouting for enemies. Upon my appearance, the flock broke away at good speed but in excellent order, the old ram leading the way. In scrambling up for a farewell view, I disturbed a mountain lion. He bounded among the scattered wreckage of granite and vanished. Here was big game and its well-fed pursuer, in the mountain heights, above the limits of tree growth and almost three miles above the surface of the sea. Many flocks live at an altitude of twelve thousand feet. Here the lambs are born, and from this place they all make spring foraging excursions far down the slopes into a warmer zone for green stuffs not yet in season on the heights. Their warm covering of soft hair protects them from the coldest blasts. Winter quarters appear to be chosen in localities from which winds regularly sweep the snow. This sweeping prevents the snow from burying food beyond reach, and lessens the danger of these short-legged mountaineers becoming snowbound. They commonly endure wind-storms by crowding closely against the lee side of a ledge. Now and then they are so deeply drifted over with snow that many of the weaker ones perish, unable to wallow out. The snow-slide, the white terror of the heights, occasionally carries off an entire flock of these bold, vigilant sheep.

The mountain lion is a prowler, a cowardly, rapacious slaughterer, and may visit the heights at any time. Though apparently irregular in his visits, he seems to keep track of the seasons and to know the date for spring lamb, and he is likely to appear while the sheep are weak or snowbound. He is a wanton killer and is ever vigilant to slay. He lurks and lies in wait and preys upon all the birds and beasts except the bear.

This treeless realm is roamed by both the grizzly and the black bear; both pay most visits during the autumn, and the grizzly occasionally hibernates in these uplands. In summer they range the forests far below, but with the coming of autumn they climb the slopes to dig out fat woodchucks and to get the last of the season's berries, with which to put on final fat for hibernating. They overturn stones for mice and lick up the accumulations of chilled insects which they find along the snow and ice fields. Myriads of flies, moths, grasshoppers, and other insects often accumulate along or on the edge of snow or ice fields in the heights, attracted, apparently, by the brilliant whiteness of the ice or the snow. The cold closely surrounding air zone appears to benumb or paralyze them, and they drop in great numbers near the margin. Occasionally swarms of insects are carried by storms up the heights and dropped upon the snow or ice fields which lie in the eddying-places of the wind.

One autumn I accompanied a gentleman to the Hallett Glacier. On arriving, we explored a crevasse and examined the bergschrund at the top. When we emerged from the bergschrund, the new snow on the glacier was so softened in the sunshine that we decided to have the fun of coasting down the steep face to the bottom of the slope. Just as we slid away, I espied a bear at the bottom, toward which we were speeding. He was so busily engaged in licking up insects that he had not noticed us. Naturally the gentleman with me was frightened, but it was impossible to stop on the steep, steel-like, and snow-lubricated slope. Knowing something of bear nature, the situation, though most interesting, did not appear serious to me. Meantime, the bear heard us and made lively and awkward efforts to be gone. He fled at a racing gallop, and gave us an excellent side view of his clumsy, far-outreaching lively hind legs going it flatfooted.

Deer are among the summer visitors in the cool uplands, climbing a thousand feet or more above the uppermost trees. With the first autumn snow they start to descend, and they commonly winter from three to six thousand feet below their summer range. There are a few woodchuck colonies as high as twelve thousand feet. The woodchuck, in the spring, despite short legs and heavy body, gives way to wanderlust, and as a change from hibernation wanders afar and occasionally climbs a mountain-peak. Sometimes, too, a mountain lion prevents his return. The silver fox is a permanent resident of these heights and ranges widely over them. He catches woodchucks and ptarmigan and feasts on big game that has met with accident or that has been left to waste by that wild game-hog, the mountain lion. In summer, and occasionally in winter, both the coyote and the wolf come into the fox's territory.

In slide rock and in bouldery moraines up as high as thirteen thousand feet, one finds the pika, or cony. Almost nothing is known of his domestic life. Apparently he does not hibernate, for on sunny days he may be seen the year round. Like the beaver he each autumn lays up supplies for winter. Hay is his harvest. This hay is frequently placed in conical piles in the shelter of shelving rocks. These piles are sometimes two feet in diameter. His haymaking is done with much hurry. After quickly biting off a number of plants or grasses, he commonly seizes these by their ends and simply scampers for the harvest pile. Quickly thrusting them in, he hurries away for more. His ways are decidedly in contrast to the beaver's deliberate movements. When he is sunning himself, one may, by moving slowly, approach within a few feet. He has a squeaky whistle and a birdlike call, each of which it is difficult to describe. He is a tailless little fellow, and has round ratlike ears; is dark gray above and whitish beneath. In appearance he reminds one of a small guinea-pig, or a young rabbit.

Up in this region, the most skyward of life zones, nature, as everywhere, is red in tooth and claw. There are strength and cunning, victor and vanquished, pursuit and death. One day, while watching a beetle, I saw a deadly attack. For more than an hour the beetle had been doing nothing except turn this way and then that without getting two inches from the grass-edge on the top of a stone. Suddenly a black bit darted past my face, struck the beetle, and knocked him over. It was a wasp, and for a few seconds these two warriors clinched, and fought with all their strength, cunning, and weapons. While locked in deadly struggle, they fell over a cliff that was twelve inches high; the fall broke their hold; this was instantly renewed, but presently they ceased to struggle, with the wasp victor.

The weasel is the white wolf among the small people of the heights. In winter his pure white fur allows him to slip almost unsuspected through the snow. He preys upon the cony and the birds of the alpine zone. Like the mountain lion and some human hunters, he does wanton killing just for amusement. He is bloodthirsty, cunning, and even bold. Many times, within a few feet, he has glared fiendishly at me, seeming almost determined to attack; his long, low-geared body and sinister and snaky eyes make him a mean object to look upon.

An experience with a number of rosy finches in the midst of a blizzard was one of the most cheerful ever given me by wild fellow creatures. While snowshoeing across one of the high passes, I was caught in a terrific gale, which dashed the powdered snow-dust so thickly and incessantly that breathing was difficult and at times almost strangling. Crawling beneath an enormous rock-slab to rest and breathe, I disturbed a dozen or so rosy finches already in possession and evidently there for the same purpose as myself. They moved to one side and made room for me, but did not go out. As I settled down, they looked at me frankly and without a fear. Such trust! After one calm look, they gave me no further attention. Although trustful and friendly, they were reserved and mannerly. From time to time there were comings and goings among them. Almost every snow-dashed incoming stranger gave me a look as he entered, and then without the least suspicion turned to his own feathers and affairs. With such honor, I forgot my frosted nose and the blizzard. Presently, however, I crawled forth and groped through the blinding hurricane and entered a friendly forest, where wind-shaped trees at timber-line barely peeped beneath the drifted snow.

The rosy finch, the brown-capped leucosticte of the Rockies (in the Sierra it is the gray-crowned), is a little larger than a junco and is one of the bravest and most trusting of the winged mountaineers. It is the most numerous of the resident bird-population. These cheery little bits live in the mountain snows, rarely descending below timber-line. Occasionally they nest as high as thirteen thousand five hundred feet.

The largest bird resident of the snowy heights is the ptarmigan. Rarely does this bird descend below the timber-line. But a late and prolonged winter storm may drive him and his neighbor the rosy finch a mile or so down the slopes. The first fine day he is back again to the happy heights. The ptarmigan lives in the heathery growths among huge rocky débris. Much of the winter-time he shelters himself in deeply penetrating holes or runs in the compacted snow. His food consists of the seeds and buds of alpine plants, grasses, and insects. His ways remind one of a grouse, though he is a smaller bird. During winter he appears in suit of white, stockings and all. In spring a few black and cinnamon-colored feathers are added, and by midsummer his dress is grayish-brown. During all seasons he is fairly well concealed from enemies by the protective coloration of his clothes, and he depends largely upon this for protection. He is preyed upon by the weasel, fox, bear, eagle, and lion.

Although the mountain-tops have only a few resident birds, they have numerous summer bird builders and sojourners. Many birds nest in these heights instead of going to similar conditions in the great Arctic Circle nursery. Thus most birds met with in the heights during the summer season are the migratory ones. Among the summer residents are the American pipit, the white-crowned sparrow, and the gray-headed junco, the latter occasionally raising two broods in a summer. Here, too, in autumn come flocks of robins and other birds for late berries before starting southward.

The golden eagle may soar above the peaks during all the seasons, but he can hardly be classed as a resident, for much of the winter he spends in the lower slopes of the mountains. Early in the spring he appears in the high places and nests among the crags, occasionally twelve thousand feet above sea-level. The young eaglets are fed in part upon spring lamb from the near-by wild flocks.

One day, while in a bleak upland above the timber-line, I paused by a berg-filled lake, a miniature Arctic Ocean, with barren rock-bound shores. A partly snow-piled, half-frozen moor stretched away into an arctic distance. Everything was silent. Near by a flock of ptarmigan fed upon the buds of a clump of arctic willow that was dwarfed almost out of existence. I felt as though in the polar world. "Here is the environment of the Eskimo," I discoursed to myself. "He ought to be found in this kind of place. Here are icebergs, frozen tundras, white ptarmigan, dwarf willows, treeless distances. If arctic plants were transported down here on the Big Ice Floe, surely some Eskimo must have been swept along. Why didn't he stay? The climate was better, but perhaps he missed his blubber and sea food, and there was no midnight sun and the nights were extremely short. The pale and infrequent aurora borealis must have reminded him of better nights, if not better days. Anyway, even for the Eskimo, there is no place like home, even though it be in a domed and dingy ice house amid the eternal snows and beneath the wonderful sky of northern lights."

There are fields of varied wild flowers. Brilliant in color, dainty, beautiful, and graceful, they appear at their best amid the wild magnificence of rocky peaks, alpine lakes, and aged snow-fields, and on the far-extending lonely moorlands. Many of these flowers are your lowland friends, slightly dwarfed in some cases, but with charms even fresher, brighter, and more lovely than those of the blooms you know. Numerous upland stretches are crowded and colored in indescribable richness,—acres of purple, blue, and gold. The flowers, by crowding the moist outskirts of snow-drifts, make striking encircling gardens of bloom. In contributed and unstable soil-beds, amid ice and boulders, they take romantic rides and bloom upon the cold backs of the crawling glaciers, and thus touch with color and beauty the most savage of wild scenes.

The distribution and arrangement of the flowers has all the charm of the irregular, and for the most part is strikingly effective and delightfully artistic. They grow in bunches and beds; the stalks are long and short; rock towers and barren débris frown on meadow gardens and add to the attractiveness of the millions of mixed blossoms that dance or smile. Ragged tongues of green and blossoms extend for miles. One of the peculiarities of a few of these plants is that they have stems and axes horizontal rather than vertical. Others are masses of mossy, cushion-like bloom. In many cases there is a marked enlargement of the root-growth, but the flowers compare favorably in size, sweetness, and brilliancy of coloring with their lowland relatives.

Among the blossoms that shine in these polar gardens are the spring beauty, the daisy, the buttercup, and the forget-me-not. There are numbers of the pink and the saxifrage families, white and purple monkshood, purple asters, and goldenrod. Whole slopes are covered with paintbrushes, and among these commonly is a scattering of tall, white-tipped wild buckwheat. Some of these are scentless, while others diffuse a rich perfume.

There are numerous hanging gardens that are grander than all the kings of the earth could create! White cascades with the soft, fluttering veils of spray pour through the brilliant bloom and the bright green of the terraces. In these gardens may bloom the bluest of mertensia, gentians, and polemonium, the brightest of yellow avens, the ruddy stonecrop, and gaillardias as handsome as any black-eyed Susan; then there is a fine scattering of shooting-stars, starworts, pentstemons of prettiest shades, and the tall and stately columbine, a burst of silver and blue.

Many of the polar plants that bloom in this Arctic world were probably brought here from the Arctic Circle by the vast and prolonged flow of ice from the north during the last ice age. Stranded here by the receding, melting ice, they are growing up with the country under conditions similar to those in the Northland. They are quick to seize and beautify each new soil-bed that appears,—soil exposed by the shrinking of snow-fields, piled by landslides, washed down by water, or made by the dropped or deposited sweepings of the winds.

Bees and butterflies follow the flowers, and every wild garden has the buzz of busy wings and the painted sails of idle ones. Mountain sheep occasionally pose and group among the flowers and butterflies. Often sheep, crags, ptarmigan, and green spaces, flowers, and waterfalls are caught in one small space that sweeps up into the blue and cloud in one grand picture.

In many localities there are such numbers of dwarfed plants that one may blunder through a fairy flower-garden without seeing it. To see these tiny flowers at their best, one needs to lie down and use a reading-glass. There are diminutive bellflowers that rise only half an inch above the earth and masses of cushion pinks and tiny phlox still finer and shorter.

The Arctic-Alpine zone, with its cloud and bright sunshine, rests upon the elevated and broken world of the Rockies. This realm is full of interest through all the seasons, and with its magnificence are lovely places, brilliant flowers, and merry birds to cheer its solitudes. During winter these polar mountain-stretches have a strange charm, and many a time my snowshoe tracks have left dotted trails upon their snowy distances.

These cheerful wild gardens are threatened with ruin. Cattle and sheep are invading them farther and farther, and leaving ruin behind. With their steep slopes, coarse soil, and shallow root-growths these alpine growths cannot endure pasturage. The biting, the pulling, and the choppy hoof-action are ruinous. Destined to early ruin if pastured, and having but little value when so used, these sky gardens might rightly be kept unimpaired for ourselves. They would make delightful National Parks. They have a rapidly increasing value for parks. Used for recreation places, they would have a high commercial value; and thus used they would steadily pay dividends in humanity.

Some Forest History

Some Forest History

Two picturesque pine stumps stood for years in the edge of a grove near my cabin. They looked as old as the hills. Although they had wasted a little through weathering, they showed no sign of decay. Probably they were the ruins of yellow pine trees that before my day had perished in a forest fire. The heat of the fire that had caused their death had boiled the pores of these stumps full of pitch. They were thus preserved, and would endure a long, long time.

I often wondered how old they were. A chance to get this information came one morning when a number of old pines that grew around these stumps were blown over. Among those that went down were three large and ancient yellow pines and several smaller lodge-pole pines. These I dissected and studied, with the idea that their annual wood rings, together with the scars and embossments, might give information concerning the death of the old brown-gray stumps.

Two of the yellow pines showed two hundred and fifty-six annual rings; the other showed two hundred and fifty-five. All carried fire scars, received in the year 1781. Apparently, then, the stumps had been dead and weathering since 1781. The annual rings in the overthrown lodge-poles showed that they started to grow in 1782. Lodge-pole pines commonly spring up immediately after a fire; these had apparently taken possession of the ground as soon as it was laid bare by the fire that had killed and partly consumed the two yellow pines and injured the three scarred ones. Since the lodge-poles were free from fire scars, since the yellow pine showed no scar after 1781, and since all these trees had stood close about the stumps, it was plain that the stumps were the remnants of trees that perished in a forest fire in 1781.

Later, a number of trees elsewhere in the grove were called upon to testify, and these told a story that agreed with that of the trees that had stood close to the stumps. These stumps are now the newel-posts in a rustic stairway.

Near my home on the slope of Long's Peak are the records of an extraordinary succession of forest fires. During the last two hundred and fifty years eight large fires and numerous small ones have occurred. Each left a black, fire-engraved date-mark. The dates of some of these fires are 1675, 1707, 1753, 1781, 1842, 1864, 1878, 1885, and 1900. Each fire burned over from a few hundred to a few thousand acres. In part, nature promptly reforested after each fire; consequently some of the later fires swept over areas that had been burned over by the earlier ones. Here and there a fire-scarred tree, escaping with its life, lived on to preserve in its rings the date of the conflagration. In one old pine I found seven widely separated scars that told of seven different fires. In addition to the records in isolated trees, there were records also in many injured trees in groves that had survived and in ragged forest-edges where forest fires had stopped. An excellent check on the evidence given by the annual rings of fire-scarred trees was found in the age of the new tree-growth that came up in the fire-swept territory in which, or on the borders of which, were the telltale fire-injured trees.

Some fires swept so clean that they left behind no date of their ravages, but here and there the character of the forest and of the soil in which it stood made me feel certain that the growth had arisen from the ashes of a fire, and that I could tell the extent of the fire. In most localities the fire-killed forest is at once restored by nature. That ever enthusiastic sower, the wind, reseeds most burned areas within a year. Burns on the Western mountains commonly are covered with young lodge-pole or aspen within three years. There are a few dry wind-swept slopes or places left rocky for which years or even centuries may be required to re-earth and reforest.

Some members of the Pine Family endure fire much better than others. The "big tree," the redwood, and the yellow and sugar pines will survive far hotter fires than their relatives, for their vitals are protected by a thick sheath of slow-burning bark. The Western yellow pine is one of the best fire-fighters in the forest world. Its vitals appear able to endure unusual heat without death, and it will survive fires that kill neighboring trees of other kinds. In old trees the trunk and large limbs are thickly covered with heat-and-fire-resisting bark. In examining a number of these old fellows that were at last laid low by snow or landslide or the axe, I found that some had triumphantly survived a number of fiery ordeals and two or three lightning-strokes. One pine of eight centuries carried the scars of four thunderbolts and seven wounds that were received from fires decades apart.

The deciduous, or broad-leaf, trees resist fires better than the coniferous, or evergreen, trees. Pines and spruces take fire much more readily than oaks and maples, because of the resinous sap that circulates through them; moreover, the pines and spruces when heated give off an inflammable gas which, rising in front of a forest fire, adds to the heat and destructiveness, and the eagerness of the blaze. Considered in relation to a fire, the coniferous forest is a poor risk because it is more inflammable than a deciduous one.

Another advantage possessed by broad-leaf trees lies in the rapid growth of their seedlings. Surface fires annihilate most tiny trees. Two-year-old chestnuts, maples, and, in fact, many of the broad-leaf youngsters, are three or more feet high, and are able to survive a severe fire; but two-year-old white pine, Engelmann spruce, or long-leaf pine are barely two inches high,—just fuzzy-topped matches stuck in the earth that perish in a flash from a single breath of flame.

The ability to send up sprouts, which most deciduous trees possess, is also a very great advantage in the fight against fire. A fire may destroy a deciduous forest and all its seeds without injuring the potent roots beneath the surface. The year following the fire, most of these roots send up sprouts that swiftly grow to replace the fallen forest. Among the so-called Pine Family, the ability to send up sprouts or shoots is limited to a few kinds, most prominent of which is the redwood.

Repeated forest fires have injured enormously the Southern hardwood forests; they have damaged millions of trees so that they have become hollow or punky-hearted. These fires have burned off limbs or burned into the trunks or the roots and made openings through which many kinds of fungi have entered the hearts of the trees, to doom them to rot and decay.

Forest fires have been common through the ages. Charcoal has been found in fossil. This has a possible age of a million years. Charred logs have been found, in Dakota and elsewhere, several hundred feet beneath the surface. The big trees of California have fire scars that are two thousand years old.

The most remarkable forest fire records that I ever saw were found in a giant California redwood. This tree was felled a few years ago. Its trunk was cut to pieces and studied by scientific men, who from the number of its annual rings found the year of its birth, and also deciphered the dates of the various experiences the tree had had with fire.

This patriarch had stood three hundred feet high, was sound to the core, and had lived through two thousand one hundred and seventy-one years. Its existence began in the year 271 B.C. After more than five centuries of life, in A.D. 245 it was in the pathway of a forest fire from which it received a bad burn on the lower trunk. It was one hundred and five years before this burn was fully covered with tissue and bark.

Following this fire came the peaceful procession of twelve centuries. Eleven hundred and ninety-six times the golden poppies came to glorify the green hills of spring, while the songs of mating birds filled woods and meadows. More than a thousand times the aspens ripened and scattered their golden leaves, while this serene evergreen grew and towered more and more noble through the centuries.

Elsewhere the forests were dim with smoke, and on the Sierra during these centuries the heroic "big trees" received many a scar from fire. But not until 1441 did fire again try this veteran. Soon after this burn was healed there came a third fire. This was less injurious than the preceding ones, for the wound that it inflicted healed in half a century.

Higher and more stately the tree grew, and in 1729 it attained the age of two thousand years. At the age of two thousand and eighty-eight years the fourth fire attacked it. This fire burned an eighteen-foot scar upon the trunk of the old tree. In 1900, after the lapse of almost a century, only a small part of this wound was overgrown. This year, 1900, came the reaper, the axeman, who laid low this aged and monumental tree!

What starts forest fires? Some are started by lightning; others are kindled by meteors that are flung from the sky, or by fire that is hurled or poured from a volcano; a few are caused by spontaneous combustion; and many are set by man. Down through the ages primitive and civilized men have frequently set fire to the forest. These fires are set sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally. The forest has been fired to drive out game, to improve pasturage, to bewilder the enemy during war, and to clear the land for the plow.

During one of my Colorado camping-trips a high October wind brought me the information that spruce wood was burning near by. While I was searching for the fire in the thick needle carpet of the forest floor, a spark from above settled before me. A fire was sputtering and starting in a tree top about thirty feet above the earth. This fire was starting where a dead leaning tree-trunk was rasping and rubbing against an upright one. The bark of the standing tree was powdered and tufted with wood-dust which had been ground by friction from the trunks as they swayed and rotated in the wind. This inflammable wood-dust, together with accumulated bark-bits and needles, had been set on fire from the heat generated by these two big sticks rubbing together. Plainly this was a friction fire. The incessant swaying of treetops in the tireless wind occasionally causes a smoke from friction at points where overlapping limbs or entangled trees are rubbing. Within a few minutes after my discovery, this fire was roaring eagerly through the treetops.

Friction fires are rare, but my old notebooks tell of numerous fires that were set by lightning. Before this fire, which was in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, had died out, a lightning-set fire in the mountains of central Colorado had attracted my attention with massive, magnificent smoke-clouds, which were two or three thousand feet above the mountain-tops. Though thirty miles distant, these clouds occasionally took on the bossy white splendor of big cumuli assembling for summer rain. I resolved to see the fire at close range.

Until burned territory was reached, I followed along sky-line ridges through changing conditions of clear sky, smoke, and falling ashes, ready for swift retreat down a slope in case the fire advanced under smoke cover and surprised me. The burn was entered at the first edge I reached. Millions of seared and blackened trees were standing steadfastly where they had died at their post. All twigs and leafage were burned away, but the majority of the trees still carried their larger limbs and patches of bark. In places only the tree-trunk, a fire-carved totem pole, remained. Whirlwinds of flame had moved, and in places every burnable thing on the surface was consumed, and even tree-roots were burned out two and three feet beneath the surface.

Though weirdly interesting, these ashen fields of desolation were not wholly lifeless. Here, as elsewhere, feasters came to banquet, and good fortune brought favorites to the scene of panic and death. Flocks of gorged magpies were about, and unwontedly bold coyotes, both filled and foraging, were frequently met with. At one place a half-dozen beaver were portaging round a tumble of charred tree-trunks that obstructed the brook-channel. Fire had destroyed the food-supply, and the beaver were seeking home and harvest in other scenes. A grizzly bear was wading their pond and feasting on the dead trout that floated on the surface. Two black bears, despite terrible threats from the grizzly, claimed all the fish that came within reach of the shore. They discreetly kept out of the pond.

Two fawns and their mother lay dead at the foot of a cliff. Either blinded or terrorized by fire or smoke, they apparently had leaped or fallen to death. As I gained the top in climbing to investigate, an eagle swooped angrily at me from a topless trunk. Her mate with scorched feathers lay on the rocks near by. On returning a few days later I found her still watching the lifeless one from the same perch in the dead tree.

In the heart of the burned tract was a thirty-or-forty-acre tract of forest that had escaped the fire. It was surrounded with wide though broken barriers of rock ledges. In this green oasis were numerous wild-folk refugees. Chipmunks, rats, woodchucks, and birds were startlingly abundant, but no big game. Apparently the home people had welcomed the refugees, or had received them indifferently. The only fight noticed was between mountain rats. However, this crowding and overrunning of territory when the exciting fire was over, probably made many terrible pages of animal history, before exodus and death brought a normal readjustment of life to the territory.

Wandering on across the burn toward the fire-line, I came to the place where a ragged-edged and beautiful glacier meadow had reposed, a poetic park among the spruces dark and tall. Commonly these meadows are sufficiently saturated to defy fire, but this one was burning, though slowly and with but little blaze or smoke. The fire was working toward the centre from the edges and eating downward from one to three feet. This kind of meadow usually carries a covering stratum of a kind of peat or turf which is composed almost entirely of matted grass or sedge roots that are almost free from earthy or mineral matter. These meadows lack warmth or soil sufficient to germinate tree seeds or to grow trees. Often they remain beautiful treeless gardens for generations, while wind and wash slowly bring sediment, or until a flood or landslip brings soil. The deep burning of the surface and the consequent deposit of ash on the new surface probably offered an abiding-place to the next adventurous tree seeds. Glacier meadows occasionally have this kind of ending.

Two prospectors were found at work in a spruce forest near which the fire started but which it did not reach for a week. These men said that, an hour or so after a thunder-shower of a few days before, one of the brown beetle-killed pines had sent up a smoke-column. Apparently lightning had struck this tree. The following day a small fire was burning near it. This expanded into the forest fire. Commonly it is a standing dead tree that is set on fire by the lightning, but the bolt sometimes fires accumulated trash around the roots where it enters the earth.

Within this extensive burn the trees had stood from thirty to one hundred and forty feet high and from two hundred to three thousand to the acre, and they were from thirty to four hundred and fifty years old. A majority were about two centuries old. The predominating kinds were yellow pine, Douglas spruce, Engelmann spruce, and aspen. Different altitudes, forest fires, and a variety of slope-exposures, along with the peculiar characteristics of each species, had distributed these in almost pure stands, an area of each kind to itself. There was some overlapping and mixing, but lodge-pole pine noticeably stood by itself.

Where first encountered, this fire was roaring through a thick second growth of lodge-pole pine. Scattered through this young growth were hundreds of dead and limbless trees killed by a fire of thirty years before. The preservative effect of their fiery death had kept these great pillars sound, though they had become checked and weathered. They burned slowly, and that night while the fire-front was storming a ridge, these columns spread sparks and flames from split sides, or as gigantic candles blazed only at the top. Yellow pines and Douglas spruces killed in an intensely hot fire are so cooked and preserved that they will resist weathering or rot for decades. I have seen a few of these pitchy broken fellows standing erect in the depth of a century-old second generation of forest with the arms of the living trees about and above them.

Down a slope a fire moves more slowly and with lower temperature than upward on the same slope. A fire may rush in a minute up a slope which it would require a day to creep down. A fire is more all-consuming in going up, and even after years have passed, the remains left on a slope will often enable one to determine whether a fire swept up or crept down. One peculiarity of flames in young growths on steep slopes is that they sometimes dart up the heights in tongues, leaving narrow ragged stretches of unburned trees! Usually these fiery tongues sweep in a straight line up the slope.

The intense heat of a passing fire-front is withering at long distances. I have known a fire to blister aspen clumps that were seven or eight hundred feet from the nearest burned trees. The passing flames may have been pushed much closer than this by slow heavy air-swells or by the brief blasts of wild wind rushes.

The habits of forest fires are largely determined by slope-inclination, wind-speed, and the quantity and quality of the fuel. In places the fire slips quietly along with low whispering, then suddenly it goes leaping, whirling, and roaring. A fire may travel less than one mile or farther than one hundred miles in a day. The ever varying slope and forest conditions in the mountains are constantly changing the speed and the enthusiasm of a fire. Where all conditions are favorable, it sweeps level stretches at a mile-a-minute speed and rolls up slopes with the speed of sound!

One evening I climbed a high ridge that stood about half a mile in front of a heavily forested peninsula which the fire-front would reach in a few hours. The fire was advancing across the valley with a front of about two miles. On arriving at the top of the ridge, I came up behind a grizzly bear seated on his haunches like a dog, intently watching the fire below. On discovering me he took a second look before concentrating his mind on a speedy retreat. Along the ridge about a quarter of a mile distant, a number of mountain sheep could be seen through the falling ashes, with heads toward the fire, but whether they were excited or simply curious could not be determined.

The forested peninsula which extended from between two forested cañons had a number of meadow openings on the slopes closest to me. Around these were many brilliant fiery displays. Overheated trees in or across these openings often became enveloped in robes of invisible gas far in advance of the flames. This gas flashed and flared up before the tree blazed, and occasionally it convoyed the flames across openings one hundred feet or so above the earth. Heated isolated trees usually went with a gushing flash. At other places this flaming sometimes lasted several seconds, and, when seen through steamy curtains or clouds of smoke, appeared like geysers of red fire.

At times there were vast scrolls and whirling spirals of sparks above and around the torrential, upstreaming flames of the fire-front. Millions of these sparks were sometimes formed by high outflowing air streams into splendid and far-reaching milky ways. In moments of general calm the sky was deeply filled with myriads of excited sparks, which gradually quieted, then floated beautifully, peacefully up to vanish in the night.

Meantime the fire-front was pushed by wind-currents and led by ridges. By the time the fire-line had advanced to the steeper slopes it was one vast U about three miles long. Its closed end was around the peninsula toward me. The fire-front rushed upward through the dense forest of the peninsula steeps more swiftly than the wildest avalanche could have plunged down. The flames swept across three-hundred-foot grassy openings as easily as breakers roll in across a beach. Up the final two thousand feet there were magnificent outbursts and sheets of flame with accompanying gale and stormy-ocean roars. Terrific were the rushes of whirled smoke-and-flame clouds of brown, ashen green, and sooty black. There were lurid and volcanic effects in molten red and black, while tattered yellow flames rushed, rolled, and tumbled everywhere.

An uprushing, explosive burst of flames from all sides wrapped and united on the summit. For a minute a storm of smoke and flame filled the heavens with riot. The wild, irresistible, cyclonic rush of fiery wind carried scores of tree-limbs and many blazing treetops hundreds of feet above the summit. Fire and sparks were hurled explosively outward, and a number of blazing treetops rushed off in gale-currents. One of these blazing tops dropped, a destructive torch, in a forest more than a mile distant from the summit!

Mountain Lakes

Mountain Lakes

High up in the Rocky Mountains are lakes which shine as brightly as dewdrops in a garden. These mountains are a vast hanging garden in which flowers and waterfalls, forests and lakes, slopes and terraces, group and mingle in lovely grandeur. Hundreds of these lakes and tarns rest in this broken topography. Though most of them are small, they vary in size from one acre to two thousand acres. Scores of these lakes have not been named. They form a harmonious part of the architecture of the mountains. Their basins were patiently fashioned by the Ice King. Of the thousand or more lakes in the Colorado mountains only a few are not glacial. The overwhelming majority rest in basins that were gouged and worn in solid rock by glaciers. John Muir says that Nature used the delicate snowflake for a tool with which to fashion lake-basins and to sculpture the mountains. He also says: "Every lake in the Sierra is a glacier lake. Their basins were not merely remodeled and scoured out by this mighty agent, but in the first place were eroded from the solid." The Rocky Mountain lakes are set deep in cañons, mounted on terraces, and strung like uncut gems along alpine streams. The boulders in many of their basins are as clean and new as though just left by the constructive ice.

These lakes are scattered through the high mountains of Colorado, the greater number lying between the altitudes of ten thousand and twelve thousand feet. Few were formed above the altitude of twelve thousand, and most of those below ten thousand now are great flowerpots and hold a flower-illumined meadow or a grove. Timber-line divides this lake-belt into two nearly equal parts. Many are small tarns with rocky and utterly wild surroundings. Circular, elliptical, and long, narrow forms predominate. Some lie upon a narrow terrace along the base of a precipice. Many are great circular wells at the bottom of a fall; others are long and narrow, filling cañons from wall to wall.

Glaciers the world over have been the chief makers of lake-basins, large and small. These basins were formed in darkness, and hundreds and even thousands of years may have been required for the ice to carve and set the gems whose presence now adds so much to the light and beauty of the rugged mountain-ranges. The ponderous glaciers or ice rivers in descending from the mountain-summits came down steep slopes or precipitous walls and bore irresistibly against the bottom. The vast weight of these embankments of ice moving almost end-on, mixed with boulders, tore and wore excavations into the solid rock at the bottom of each high, steep descent.

Nature's ways are interestingly complicated. Both the number and the location of many of these glacier lakes are due in part to the prevailing direction of the wind during the last glacial epoch. This is especially true of those in the Snowy Range of the Rocky Mountains, which fronts the Great Plains. The majority of the lakes in this range are situated on its eastern slope. Westerly winds undoubtedly prevailed on these mountains during the depositing of the snows which formed and maintained the glaciers that excavated these lake-basins. As a result, much of the snow which fell on the summit and its westerly slope was swept across and deposited on the eastern slope, thus producing on the eastern side deeper ice, more glaciers, and more appreciable erosion from the glaciers. The eastern summit of this range is precipitous and is deeply cut by numerous ice-worn cirques which extend at right angles to the trend of this range. These cirques frequently lie close together, separated by a thin precipitous wall, or ridge. On the westerly side of the range the upper slopes descend into the lowlands through slopes and ridges rounded and but little broken. Over these it is possible to ride a horse to the summit, while foot travel and careful climbing over precipitous rocky walls is in most places required to gain the summit from the east.

Westerly winds still blow strongly, sometimes for weeks, and the present scanty snowfall is largely swept from the western slopes and deposited on the eastern side. So far as I know, all the remaining glaciers in the front ranges are on the eastern slope. The Arapahoe, Sprague, Hallett, and Andrews Glaciers and the one on Long's Peak are on the eastern slope. They are but the stubs or remnants of large glaciers, and their presence is due in part to the deep, cool cirques cut out by the former ice-flows, and in part to the snows swept to them by prevailing westerly winds.

Though these lakes vary in shape and size, and though each is set in a different topography, many have a number of like features and are surrounded with somewhat similar verdure. A typical lake is elliptical and about one fifth of a mile long; its altitude about ten thousand feet; its waters clear and cold. A few huge rock-points or boulders thrust through its surface near the outlet. A part of its circling shore is of clean granite whose lines proclaim the former presence of the Ice King. Extending from one shore is a dense, dark forest. One stretch of low-lying shore is parklike and grassy, flower-crowded, and dotted here and there with a plume of spruce or fir. By the outlet is a filled-in portion of the lake covered with sedge and willow.

In summer, magpies, woodpeckers, nuthatches, and chickadees live in the bordering woods. In the willows the white-crowned sparrow builds. By the outlet or in the cascades above or below is the ever-cheerful water-ouzel. The solitaire nesting near often flies across the lake, filling the air with eager and melodious song. Along the shore, gentians, columbines, paintbrushes, larkspur, and blue mertensia often lean over the edge and give the water-margin the beauty of their reflected colors.

These lakes above the limits of tree-growth do not appear desolate, even though stern peaks rise far above. The bits of flowery meadow or moorland lying close or stretching away, the songful streams arriving or departing, soften their coldness and give a welcome to their rock-bound, crag-piled shores. Mountain sheep are often visitors. They come to drink, or to feed and play in the sedgy meadow near by. Ptarmigan have their homes here, and all around them nest many birds from the southland.

Into these lakes swift waters run, and here the snowy cataract leaps in glory. From the overshadowing cliffs, flattened and lacy streams flutter down. During the summer there is the ever-flowing harmony, the endless animation, of falling water; and in winter there is the silent and architectural symphony of the frozen waterfall. Many lakes during summer are partly edged with inthrusting snow and ice piles; from time to time fragments of these piles break away and become miniature icebergs in these small arctic seas.

Although filled with the purest and clearest water, from a distant height they often appear to contain a brilliant heavy liquid. Under different lights and from different points of view they are emerald, opal, inky black, violet, indigo-blue, and sea-green. I have approached one from a high distant point, and as I descended and waveringly advanced, the lake took on a number of deep colors, each melting like a passing shadow from one into the other. Occasionally, too, it almost vanished in dull gray or flashed up in molten silver. The colors shown were as vivid as if made of the brilliant fire of the northern lights. All these changing colors played on the lake, while the surrounding peaks towered in cold and silent desolation, changeless except when occasionally swept with the filmy bluish shadows of the clouds.

Below the timber-line these lakes are more appealing, and many in the midst of groves and meadows help to form delightful wild parks. Others are hidden away in black forests; tall, crowding firs and spruces rise from their edges and hide them completely, even when one is only a yard or two from their shores. I camped for a week within a stone's throw of one of these forest-embowered gems without suspecting its presence. Returning to camp one evening from an encircling ramble, I was startled by stepping into a lake-edge. For a moment I was puzzled. Instinctively I felt that my camp was about the width of the lake ahead of me. Although I felt certain of my bearings, my mental processes were such that I was unwilling to trust this strange lake. Instead of walking around its poetic shore, I lashed two water-soaked logs together with willows and on this rude raft made my way directly across. My camp was within fifty feet of the place where I landed.

Elements of peculiar attractiveness are combined in the lakes that are situated along the timber-line. Some have a treeless mountain or a rugged snow-piled peak rising boldly behind, and an acre or so of meadow between one shore and the forest. A segment of wind-distorted trees, a few enormous rock domes, a fine pile of boulders, and a strip of willow with clumps of spruces and firs combine to give a charming border.

Among the best known of these Colorado lakes are Grand, Trapper's, Bierstadt, Trout, San Cristoval, Chicago, Thunder, Silver, Moraine, and Twin Lakes. Grand Lake, probably the largest, is about three miles long by one mile wide. Its basin appears to be largely due to a morainal dam. The San Cristoval basin appears to have been formed by a mud stream which blockaded a mountain valley. The lakes of the Long's Peak region are my favorites. These are numerous and show a variety of forms. Grand Lake and a few others lie to the west; Thunder Lake, Ouzel Lake, and a dozen others are in Wild Basin to the south; Odessa, Bierstadt, and the score of lakes in Loch Vale and Glacier Gorge are to the north. All are within ten miles of the summit of this peak. These lakes and their splendid mountain setting will in time give scenic fame to the region.