A species of blue gentian grows in showy clusters, and meadows are filled with the brightest painted-cups in red and crimson. The heather, the heather! There are rich, deep masses of red, white, and yellow heather. The white heather is the lovely cassiope that adorns the snow edges of thousands of mountains from Mexico to the Arctic regions. Endless are the ranks of the saxifrage family in white; countless the numbers of the pink family. Here the spring beauty blooms in summer and the rose-crimson _Pentstemon rupicola_ makes a showy appearance. Also above the limits of tree growth are other little plant people: the ever-cheerful kinnikinnick; a dainty, tiny fern; numerous members of the figwort family; Lyall's lupine, with its brilliant bloom of purple flowers; the evening-primrose; and a most pungent polemonium. Growing far up the slopes is an attractive member of the dock family that is tufted with purplish-yellow bloom. A yellow mustard (_Draba aureola_) and another member of the mustard family with creamy-white flowers carry and maintain this wonderful wild-flower garden farthest above the clouds, highest up into the snow-fields and the sky. One day I found a tiny tuft of bloom in a bit of soil on the very summit of Rainier. It was in a niche of lava, surrounded with ice and snow, but warmed by the steadily escaping steam. Brave, cheerful little fellow creature! In a steamy, ice-rimmed volcano's throat on a desolate top of the world! Of all the fire-mountains which, like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest in form.... Its massive white dome rises out of its forests, like a world by itself.... Above the forests there is a zone of the loveliest flowers, fifty miles in circuit and nearly two miles wide, so closely planted and luxuriant that it seems as if Nature, glad to make an open space between woods so dense and ice so deep, were economizing the precious ground, and trying to see how many of her darlings she can get together in one mountain wreath.... We wade knee-deep and waist-deep, the bright corollas in myriads touching petal to petal.... Altogether this is the richest subalpine garden I ever found, a perfect floral elysium. (John Muir, in "Our National Parks.") The forests of this park are a splendid attraction. The trees are tall and of noble proportions. The forest floor has a tangled undergrowth of vines and shrubbery, a luxuriant carpet of ferns, mosses, and flowers. Many areas are crowded with trees from two to eight feet in diameter, from one hundred to two hundred and fifty feet high. Cedars, spruces, and hemlocks number their years by centuries. A few are perhaps a thousand years of age. Theodore Winthrop wrote of these forests:--