Far south and east of our castle-in-the-air, islands rise slowly out of a Pacific that has long rolled, unbroken, to the Rocky Mountains. We see the ocean bed pushed above the tide in what men of later ages will call the Siskiyou and the Blue Mountains, one range in southwestern, the other in eastern, Oregon. A third uptilt, the great Okanogan, in northern Washington, soon appears. All else is sea. Upon these primitive uplands, the date is written in the fossil archives of their ancient sea beaches, raised thousands of feet above the former shore-line level. At a time when all western Europe was still ocean, and busy foraminifers were strewing its floor with shells to form the chalk beds of France and England, these first lands of our Northwest emerged from the great deep. It is but a glimpse we get into the immeasurable distance of the Paleozoic. Its time-units are centuries instead of minutes. [Illustration: Sunset on Vancouver Lake, near Vancouver, Washington.] [Illustration: Fort Vancouver in 1852.] Another glance, as the next long geological age passes, and we perceive a second step in the making of the West. It is the gradual uplift of a thin sea-dike, separating the two islands first disclosed, and stretching from the present Lower California to our Alaska. It is a folding of the earth's crust that will, for innumerable ages, exercise a controlling influence upon the whole western slope of North America. At first merely a sea-dike, we see it slowly become a far-reaching range of hills, and then a vast continental mountain system, covering a broad region with its spurs and interlying plateaus. "The highest mountains," our school geographies used to tell us, "parallel the deepest oceans." So here, bordering its profound depths, the Pacific ocean, through centuries of centuries, thrust upward, fold on fold, the lofty ridges of this colossal Sierra-Cascade barrier, to be itself a guide of further land building, a governor of climate, and a reservoir of water for valleys and river basins as yet unborn. [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER Rooster Rock, south bank of the Columbia.] [Illustration: Seining for salmon on the lower Columbia.]