The Alpine Zone has a rugged, straggling growth of storm-beaten dwarf
pines (Pinus albicaulis), which forms the upper edge of the
timberline. This species reaches an elevation of about nine thousand
feet, but at this height the tops of the trees rise only a few feet
into the thin frosty air, and are closely pressed and shorn by wind
and snow; yet they hold on bravely and put forth an abundance of
beautiful purple flowers and produce cones and seeds. Down towards
the edge of the fir belt they stand erect, forming small, well-formed
trunks, and are associated with the taller two-leafed and mountain
pines and the beautiful Williamson spruce. Bryanthus, a beautiful
flowering heathwort, flourishes a few hundred feet above the
timberline, accompanied with kalmia and spiraea. Lichens enliven the
faces of the cliffs with their bright colors, and in some of the
warmer nooks of the rocks, up to a height of eleven thousand feet,
there are a few tufts of dwarf daisies, wallflowers, and penstemons;
but, notwithstanding these bloom freely, they make no appreciable show
at a distance, and the stretches of rough brown lava beyond the
storm-beaten trees seem as bare of vegetation as the great snow
fields and glaciers of the summit.

Shasta is a fire-mountain, an old volcano gradually accumulated and
built up into the blue deep of the sky by successive eruptions of
ashes and molten lava which, shot high in the air and falling in
darkening showers, and flowing from chasms and craters, grew outward
and upward like the trunk of a knotty, bulging tree. Not in one grand
convulsion was Shasta given birth, nor in any one special period of
volcanic storm and stress, though mountains more than a thousand feet
in height have been cast up like molehills in a night--quick
contributions to the wealth of the landscapes, and most emphatic
statements, on the part of Nature, of the gigantic character of the