A prairie fire commonly consumes everything to the earth-line and leaves behind it only a black field. Rarely does a forest fire make so clean a sweep; generally it burns away the smaller limbs and the foliage, leaving the tree standing all blackened and bristling. This fire, like thousands of others, consumed the litter carpet on the forest floor and the mossy covering of the rocks; it ate the underbrush, devoured the foliage, charred and burned the limbs, and blackened the trunks. Behind was a dead forest in a desolate field, a territory with millions of bristling, mutilated trees, a forest ruin impressively picturesque and pathetic. From a commanding ridge I surveyed this ashen desert and its multitude of upright figures all blurred and lifeless; these stood everywhere,--in the gulches, on the slopes, on the ridges against the sky,--and they bristled in every vanishing distance. Over the entire area only a few trees escaped with their lives; these were isolated in soggy glacier meadows or among rock fields and probably were defended by friendly air-currents when the fiery billow rolled over them. When I entered the burn that afternoon the fallen trees that the fire had found were in ashes, the trees just killed were smoking, while the standing dead trees were just beginning to burn freely. That night these scattered beacons strangely burned among the multitudinous dead. Close to my camp all through that night several of these fire columns showered sparks like a fountain, glowed and occasionally lighted up the scene with flaming torches. Weird and strange in the night were the groups of silhouetted figures in a shadow-dance between me and the flickering, heroic torches. The greater part of the area burned over consisted of mountain-slopes and ridges that lay between the altitudes of nine thousand and eleven thousand feet. The forest was made up almost entirely of Engelmann and Douglas spruces, alpine fir, and flexilis pine. A majority of these trees were from fifteen to twenty-four inches in diameter, and those examined were two hundred and fourteen years of age. Over the greater extent of the burn the trees were tall and crowded, about two thousand to the acre. As the fire swept over about eighteen thousand acres, the number of trees that perished must have approximated thirty-six million.