nd there through the trees from the tops of hills and ridges;
but it is not until Strawberry Valley is reached, where there is a grand
out-opening of the forests, that Shasta is seen in all its glory. From
base to crown clearly revealed with its wealth of woods and waters
and fountain snow, rejoicing in the bright mountain sky, and radiating
beauty on all the subject landscape like a sun. Standing in a fringing
thicket of purple spiraea in the immediate foreground is a smooth
expanse of green meadow with its meandering stream, one of the smaller
affluents of the Sacramento; then a zone of dark, close forest, its
countless spires of pine and fir rising above one another on the
swelling base of the mountain in glorious array; and, over all, the
great white cone sweeping far into the thin, keen sky--meadow, forest,
and grand icy summit harmoniously blending and making one sublime
picture evenly balanced.

The main lines of the landscape are immensely bold and simple, and so
regular that it needs all its shaggy wealth of woods and chaparral and
its finely tinted ice and snow and brown jutting crags to keep it from
looking conventional. In general views of the mountain three distinct
zones may be readily defined. The first, which may be called the
Chaparral Zone, extends around the base in a magnificent sweep nearly a
hundred miles in length on its lower edge, and with a breadth of about
seven miles. It is a dense growth of chaparral from three to six or
eight feet high, composed chiefly of manzanita, cherry, chincapin, and
several species of ceanothus, called deerbrush by the hunters, forming,
when in full bloom, one of the most glorious flowerbeds conceivable.
The continuity of this flowery zone is interrupted here and there,
especially on the south side of the mountain, by wide swaths of
coniferous trees, chiefly the sugar and yellow pines, Douglas spruce,
silver fir, and incense cedar, many specimens of which are two hundred
feet high and five to seven feet in diameter. Goldenrods, asters,
gilias, lilies, and lupines, with many other less conspicuous plants,
occur in warm sheltered openings in these lower woods, making charming
gardens of wildness where bees and butterflies are at home and many a
shy bird and squirrel.

The next higher is the Fir Zone, made up almost exclusively of two
species of silver fir. It is from two to three miles wide, has an
average elevation above the sea of some six thousand feet on its lower