To reach the snows generally means some miles of walking and climbing, often through forest covered slopes at first where the outside world is lost. Then the trees begin to thin and grow stunted, revealing between the trunks blue valleys with a lake or two and far off cliffs and mountains. At last the trees cease at 7,500 feet and you are at timberline. Here the three Rocky mountain heathers spread soft thick carpets between stiff bushes only a few feet high but with trunks a foot through, so buffeted have they been by the storms of centuries. The rows of dwarfed spruces leaning back against some rock ledge give fine shelter for the mountain goats, wisps of whose white wool cling to the stubborn branches. Then come cliffs and rocky slopes and grassy or sedgy uplands (the true alps as the word is used in Switzerland) where mountain sheep or goats pasture and wild flowers grow by the million, blue ones such as lupines, gentians, fox-gloves and forget-me-nots; yellow ones such as adder-tongues, columbines and a multitude of starry composite flowers; the red or orange Indian paint brush; and white flowers innumerable. You have reached the edge of the snow rapidly melting on a July day under a sun that is hot even on high mountains. The plants just freed from their winter covering are all bursting into bloom together, bees are humming, butterflies lazily flutter past and a humming bird poises over a blossom; for it is spring at these altitudes and there is a whole season’s work to be done, seeds ripened and all, before autumn comes in September with its snowstorms burying all under the white silence of a nine-months winter again. It is a thrilling experience to set foot at last on midsummer snow sweeping upwards, gleaming toward the higher summits, snow that never entirely melts and that is so dazzling in the July sunlight that one needs dark or colored glasses to avoid snow blindness if the tramp is to be a long one. [Illustration] GLACIER ON PRESIDENT RANGE, YOHO PARK We have no special word in English for these perpetual snow fields and so the French term NÉVÉ is commonly used. Snowline is not nearly so definite as timberline and varies with latitude, exposure and snowfall. In the eastern Rockies of Alberta, where only a few feet fall in winter, the line is scarcely below 9,000 feet; while in the western Selkirks, which catch the full brunt of the Pacific winds laden with moisture and have a snowfall of 40 or 50 feet in a year, snowline is depressed almost to timberline, about 7,500 feet. This accounts for the bareness of the eastern Rockies as compared with the splendid Alpine features of the Selkirk range, which is the lower of the two.