The ground beneath the trees is covered with a
luxuriant crop of grasses, chiefly triticum, bromus, and calamagrostis,
with purple spikes and panicles arching to one's shoulders; while the
open meadow patches glow throughout the summer with showy
flowers,--heleniums, goldenrods, erigerons, lupines, castilleias, and
lilies, and form favorite hiding and feeding-grounds for bears and deer.
The rugged south wall is feathered darkly along the top with an imposing
array of spirey Silver Firs, while the rifted precipices all the way
down to the water's edge are adorned with picturesque old junipers,
their cinnamon-colored bark showing finely upon the neutral gray of the
granite. These, with a few venturesome Dwarf Pines and Spruces, lean out
over fissured ribs and tablets, or stand erect back in shadowy niches,
in an indescribably wild and fearless manner. Moreover, the
white-flowered Douglas spiraea and dwarf evergreen oak form graceful
fringes along the narrower seams, wherever the slightest hold can be
effected. Rock-ferns, too, are here, such as allosorus, pellaea, and
cheilanthes, making handsome rosettes on the drier fissures; and the
delicate maidenhair, cistoperis, and woodsia hide back in mossy
grottoes, moistened by some trickling rill; and then the orange
wall-flower holds up its showy panicles here and there in the sunshine,
and bahia makes bosses of gold.
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