Soon more ambitious enterprises were undertaken. Huckleberry bushes, fearless even of so unfriendly a surface, started from every depression among the rocks. The first small trees appeared. Weakling pines, dwarf firs and alders, shot up for a few feet of hurried growth in the spring moisture, taking the unlikely chance of surviving the later drought. Here and there a seedling outlasted the long, dry summer, and began to be a real tree. Quickly exhausting its little handful of new earth, the daring upstart must have perished had not the melting snows brought help. They filled the hollows with wash from the higher slopes. The treelets found that their day had come, and seizing upon these rich but shallow soil beds, soon covered them with thickets of spindling lodgepole pines and deciduous brush. Such pygmy forests are at length common upon this great field of torn and decaying rock, and all are making their contributions of humus year by year to the support of future tree giants. These will rise by survival of the fittest as the forest floor deepens and spreads. [Illustration: Lava Flume south of Mount St. Helens, a tunnel several miles in length, about twenty feet high and fifteen feet wide.] [Illustration: Entrance to Lava Cave shown above. Note strata in roof, showing successive lava flows; also ferns growing from roof.] [Illustration: Telephotograph of Mount St. Helens, from the lower part of Portland, with the summit peaks of Mount Rainier-Tacoma in distance on left, and the Willamette River in foreground.] St. Helens, although much visited, has not yet been officially surveyed or mapped. Its glaciers are not named, nor has the number of true ice-streams been determined. Those on the south and southwest are insignificant. Elsewhere, the glaciers are short and broad, and with one exception, occupy shallow beds. On the southeast, there is a remarkable cleft, shown on page 115, which is doubtless due to volcanic causes rather than erosion, and from which the largest glacier issues. Another typical glacier, distinguished by the finest crevasses and ice-falls on the peak, tumbles down a steep, shallow depression on the north slope, west of the battered parasitic cone of "Black Butte." West of this glacier, in turn, ridges known as the "Lizard" and the "Boot" mark the customary north-side path to the summit. (See p. 118.) Beyond these landmarks, on the west side of the peak, a third considerable glacier feeds South Toutle River. The ravines cut by this stream will repay a visit. (See p. 116.) [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, JAS. WAGGENER, JR. Mount St. Helens, from Chelatchie Prairie on Lewis River, distance twenty miles. Shows a typical farm clearing in the forest.] [Illustration: Mount St. Helens, seen from Twin Buttes, twenty miles away, across the Cascades. View shows the remarkable cleft or canyon on the southeast face of the peak.]