I have not sketched this tour of the continental divide as a suggestion for travel, for there are no trails, and none but the mountaineer, experienced in pioneering, could accomplish it with pleasure and success, but as a convenient mode of picturing the glories of the continental divide. Some day a trail, even perhaps a road, for one is practicable, should make it fully accessible to the greater public. Meantime Flattop Trail invites valley dwellers of all degrees, afoot and horseback, up to a point on the divide from which Hallett's summit and its stupendous view is no great conquest. The gorges of the Wild Gardens are most enjoyed from below. Trails of no difficulty lead from the settlements to Fern and Odessa Lakes in a canyon unsurpassed; to Bear Lake at the outlet of the Tyndall Gorge; to Loch Vale, whose flower-carpeted terraces and cirque lakelets, Sky Pond and the Lake of Glass, are encircled with mighty canyon walls; and to Glacier Gorge, which leads to the foot of Longs Peak's western precipice. These are spots, each a day's round trip from convenient overnight hotels, which deserve all the fame that will be theirs when the people come to know them, for as yet only a few hundreds a summer of Rocky Mountain's hundred thousand take the trouble to visit them. To better understand the charm of these gray monsters, and the valleys and chasms between their knees, we must pause a moment to picture what architects call the planting, for trees and shrubs and flowers play as important a part in the informal architectural scheme of the Front Range as they do in the formality of a palace. It will be recalled that the zones of vegetation from the equator to the frozen ice fields of the far north find their counterparts in altitude. The foothills bordering the Rocky Mountain National Park lie in the austral zone of our middle and eastern states; its splendid east-side plateau and inter-mountain valleys represent the luxuriance of the Canadian zone; its mountains pass rapidly up in a few thousand feet through the Hudsonian zone, including timber-line at about 11,500 feet; and its highest summits carry only the mosses, lichens, stunted grasses, and tiny alpine flowerets of the Arctic Zone. Thus one may walk waist deep through the marvellous wild flower meadows of Loch Vale, bordered by luxuriant forests of majestic Engelmann spruce, pines, firs, junipers, and many deciduous shrubs, and look upward at the gradations of all vegetation to the arctic seas.