The triumphant glory of Mount Rainier National Park is seen in its wild flowers. It is doubtful whether anywhere else on earth is to be found so extensive and luxuriant a growth of such brightly colored flowers amid such scenes of supreme wildness and grandeur. A vast broken flower-belt encircles the peak between the ragged lower edge of the large ice-fields and the ragged upper limits of tree growth. A flower-belt fifty miles long, covered and crowded with flowers, mile after mile! It is most showy and splendid at and just above the limits of tree growth. Masses of color; myriads of blossoms, each of clean and vivid hue! This vast and splendid garden is crossed with streams and cañons, adorned with crags, green meadows, forested peninsulas, and islands of groves. This encircling flower carnival expands into numerous connected and disconnected alpine parks. Each park is a superb flower-garden with a splendid precipitous alpine back- and sky-ground. Among the more striking of these are Paradise Park, Indian Henry's Hunting Grounds, Spray Park, and Summerland. In the open upper reaches of the forest, the fragrant twin-flower covers and crowds wide places. There are thousands of cream-white mountain lilies--bear-grass--with tall, slender blooms. The shooting-star, a near relative of the cyclamen, is as thick upon the earth as stars up in the sky. Thousands of purple asters are found upon stalks two feet high. A dogtooth violet, commonly called avalanche lily, is abundant. The western anemone, with its exquisite leaves, its purple bloom and decorative seed plumes, adorns many a wild garden. Many of the plants in the high altitude grow rapidly, bloom briefly, and seed quickly. Summer is short. Acres of valerian with four-foot stalks thrust their pungent blooms beneath one's nose. The blue mertensia crowds moist places with a thicket of stalks three feet high. A lavender-colored arctic lupine grows in decorative masses. The white dock, sometimes called wild buckwheat, nods on its slender stalks two feet above the earth. The wild hellebore carries its greenish-white flowers upon stalks as high as one's head. [Illustration: MOUNT RAINIER FROM PARADISE VALLEY] Many of the yellow or golden flowers bloom close to the earth. There are golden asters and golden-rods, a mountain dandelion, a low-growing yellow buttercup called the monkey-flower, the gold-touched arnica, and yellow potentilla. These fill many wide, ragged places with a blaze of yellow glory. Low-growing lavender-colored phlox appears in masses, and Cusick's speedwell forms large patches of low-lying blue. Epilobiums cover acres of earth with pink petals.