of the Glacial Period was laid like a mantle over every mountain and
valley--throughout all these immensely protracted periods, in the
throng of these majestic operations, Nature kept her flower children
in mind. She considered the lilies, and, while planting the plains
with sage and the hills with cedar, she has covered at least one
mountain with golden erythroniums and fritillarias as its crowning
glory, as if willing to show what she could do in the lily line even
here.

Looking southward from the south end of Salt Lake, the two northmost
peaks of the Oquirrh Range are seen swelling calmly into the cool sky
without any marked character, excepting only their snow crowns, and a
few weedy-looking patches of spruce and fir, the simplicity of their
slopes preventing their real loftiness from being appreciated. Gray,
sagey plains circle around their bases, and up to a height of a
thousand feet or more their sides are tinged with purple, which I
afterwards found is produced by a close growth of dwarf oak just
coming into leaf. Higher you may detect faint tintings of green on a
gray ground, from young grasses and sedges; then come the dark pine
woods filling glacial hollows, and over all the smooth crown of snow.

While standing at their feet, the other day, shortly after my
memorable excursion among the salt waves of the lake, I said: "Now I
shall have another baptism. I will bathe in the high sky, among cool
wind-waves from the snow." From the more southerly of the two peaks a
long ridge comes down, bent like a bow, one end in the hot plains, the
other in the snow of the summit. After carefully scanning the jagged
towers and battlements with which it is roughened, I determined to
make it my way, though it presented but a feeble advertisement of its
floral wealth. This apparent barrenness, however, made no great