Although the forest is omnipresent up to snow-line in this great land-locked Sitkan district, yet it differs much in rankness of growth and consequent value; it nowhere clothes the ridges or the summits, which are 1,500 to 2,000 feet above tide-level; these peaks and rocky elevations are usually bare, and show a characteristically green-gray tint due to the sphagnous mosses and dwarfed brier and bushes peculiar to this altitude, making an agreeable and sharp contrast to that sombre and monotonous line of the conifers below. The variety is limited, being substantially confined to three evergreens, the spruce (_Abies sitkensis_ and _menziesii_), the hemlock (_Abies mertensiana_), and the cedar (_Thuja gigantea_). The last is the most valuable, is found usually growing near the shores, and never in great quantities at any one place; wherever a sheltered flat place is found, there these trees seem to grow in the greatest luxuriance. In the narrower passages, where no seas can enter, the forest seems almost to root in the beach, and its branches hang pendent to the tides, and dip therein at high water. Where a narrow beach, capped with warm sands and soil, occurs in sheltered nooks, vividly green grass spreads down until it reaches the yellow sea-weed “tangle” that grows everywhere in such places reached by high tide, for, owing to the dampness of the climate, a few days exposure at neap-tides fails to injure this fucoid growth. Ferns, oh! how beautiful they are!—also grow most luxuriantly and even abundantly upon the fallen, rotting tree-trunks, and even into the living arboreal boughs, and green mosses form great club-like masses on the branches. Large trunks of this timber, overthrown and dead, become here at once perfect gardens of young trees, moss, and bushes, even though lying high above the ground and supported on piles of yet earlier windfall. Similar features characterize the littoral forests of the entire land-locked region of the northwest coast, from Puget Sound to the mouth of Lynn Canal.