Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/318

312 and plus a great many fragments of wagon and contents. Notwithstanding which pioneer incidents, very good roads now exist over the mountains in various places.

There is no dry season on the summit of the Cascade Kange: hence trees that belong to the coast region re-appear above the region of firs, such as the black spruce, which, fed by the sea-fogs that drift over from the sea and are caught in the mountain-tops, grow abundantly. Pines, larches, dwarf junipers, and occasional cedars also flourish at a height of over five thousand feet. Looking at the mountains from the valley of Western Oregon, we see no bare peaks until we come to the snow-line. The numerous snow-peaks seem to shoot up out of evergreen forests: the more so as all the snow-capped mountains rise from the eastern side of the range.

The ascent of the snow-peaks from the western side is necessarily attended with much difficulty, except in the case of Mount Hood. The road before referred to, as leading to the Dalles, passes around the base of this grand mountain. At Mountain Meadows, the highest point on the Dalles road, we seem to be just at the foot of it, where, disengaging itself from the company of lesser peaks, it springs up clear and free, a pyramid of rock and ice, thousands of feet higher than its neighbors—bold in outline, clear-cut, symmetrical, inexpressibly grand.

For a little distance above the meadows, the mountain appears belted with a dark girdle of trees. Above and beyond that, all is sharply defined in white and black; glistening snow-fields reaching up and up, scarred here and there with projecting needles and cliffs of basalt, or seamed for immense distances by