We climbed up one of the glaciers and it surely was "some climb." Everyone in the party used an alpine stock and it gave us fellows a kind of shaky feeling in our knees when we could look down a wall of ice a thousand feet deep into a great crevasse or crack. We were glad to stand pretty close to the guide who was big and strong and who knows these glaciers as we boys know the streets of Detroit. We never knew before that ice can flow like water only much more slowly. The center of a glacier moves down the mountain about 16 inches a day. There are tiny little insects living in this ice. We saw them through the microscope and they were hopping around as though their feet were cold. There are wee pink plants growing in the ice in some places and they make the ice look rose colored. They are so small that you cannot see them without a microscope.
Rainier Park is one of the famous wild flower gardens of the world. Blooming at the very edge of the snow fields are miles and miles of wonderful flowers. There are daisies, columbine, larkspur, and many others and they are much taller and finer than those in common gardens. Grown-ups tell us boys that if we associate with great people we shall grow to be like them, and perhaps these flowers grow so big and tall from living so near Mount Rainier and the great cedars and firs. We do not wonder that this part of the park is called "Paradise Valley."
Fishing here on the Columbia River is not just a sport. It is a business which brings in millions of dollars a year. There are single factories where a half a million cans of salmon are put up in one day, and over a hundred million dollars worth of salmon have been taken from the Columbia river since the white man first came here.
The large salmon are called chinook, and one of these fish weighing eighty pounds is not an unknown thing, though their average weight is about twenty pounds. There are many small kinds of salmon, so the chinook is called "the King of Salmon."
The baby fish are hatched way up in the mountain streams and as they grow friskier and larger, they swim down the stream into the Columbia river and on to the ocean where they stay about four years till they are quite grown up. Then they get homesick for the scenes of their childhood, and, choosing their mates, they start back to a sort of "home-coming." It takes a long time, for the current is strong, but if they are lucky enough to miss getting caught and canned, they arrive at the "spawning place" after several months, and lay their eggs, and soon their little fish children are starting out to see the world as their parents did before them.