But however perfect the season and
the day, the cold incompleteness of these young lakes is always keenly
felt. We approach them with a kind of mean caution, and steal
unconfidingly around their crystal shores, dashed and ill at ease, as if
expecting to hear some forbidding voice. But the love-songs of the
ouzels and the love-looks of the daisies gradually reassure us, and
manifest the warm fountain humanity that pervades the coldest and most
solitary of them all.
CHAPTER VII
THE GLACIER MEADOWS
After the lakes on the High Sierra come the glacier meadows. They are
smooth, level, silky lawns, lying embedded in the upper forests, on the
floors of the valleys, and along the broad backs of the main dividing
ridges, at a height of about 8000 to 9500 feet above the sea.
They are nearly as level as the lakes whose places they have taken, and
present a dry, even surface free from rock-heaps, mossy bogginess, and
the frowsy roughness of rank, coarse-leaved, weedy, and shrubby
vegetation. The sod is close and fine, and so complete that you cannot
see the ground; and at the same time so brightly enameled with flowers
and butterflies that it may well be called a garden-meadow, or
meadow-garden; for the plushy sod is in many places so crowded with
gentians, daisies, ivesias, and various species of orthocarpus that the
grass is scarcely noticeable, while in others the flowers are only
pricked in here and there singly, or in small ornamental rosettes.
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