Above the timberline

Usage examples of alpine.

As from the Bernese Oberland and from the valleys of the Reuss and Limmath gigantic glaciers came down and stretched across the plain of Switzerland to the Jura, scattering their erratic boulders over its summit and upon its slopes at the time of their greater extension, and, as they withdrew into the higher Alpine valleys, leaving them along their retreating track at the foot of the Jura and over the whole plain, so did the glaciers from Glen Prossen and parallel valleys on the Grampian Mountains extend across the valley of Strathmore, dropping their boulders not only on the slopes and along the base of the Sidlaw Hills, but scattering them in their retreat throughout the valley, until they were themselves reduced to isolated glaciers in the higher valleys.

A heterogeneous collection of navigable balloons of all sizes and types gathered over the Bernese Oberland, crushed and burnt the twenty-five Swiss air-ships that unexpectedly resisted this concentration in the battle of the Alps, and then, leaving the Alpine glaciers and valleys strewn with strange wreckage, divided into two fleets and set itself to terrorise Berlin and destroy the Franconian Park, seeking to do this before the second air-fleet could be inflated.

The stately disarray of lodgepole pine, Engelmann spruce, and alpine fir yielded to the rolling grasslands of Hayden Valley.

Where the eastern-most alpine foreland of the first range met the flysch foothills at the northwestern end of the second, the river broke through a rocky barrier and turned abruptly south.

A broad meadow lay before it: deep grass and kinnikinnick spotted with alpine buttercup and pink fairyslipper.

Neudorf is the flattest and muddiest, lying towards the Rhine, and up to a century ago tended to disappear under the Rhine each time the Alpine snows melted.

In the homely Alpine villages or in the lonely mountain passes, I could tell by his quick glancing eyes and his sharp scrutiny of every face that passed us, that he was well convinced that, walk where we would, we could not walk ourselves clear of the danger which was dogging our footsteps.

They came on ice-fields like mammoth ploughlands, where they scarcely made three miles in the day, and mountainous seracs which would have puzzled an Alpine climber.

There are no Alpine peaks or grinding glaciers, no great deposits of oil or precious metals, not a hint of a pyroclastic flow.

He sat back briefly and zipped his top up to the neck in readiness for the sandblast of alpine air that was to come.

Alpine subrace, short and stocky and brunette, so they appreciate the Valkyrie type.

From her casement she looked out upon the wild grandeur of the scene, closed nearly on all sides by alpine steeps, whose tops, peeping over each other, faded from the eye in misty hues, while the promontories below were dark with woods, that swept down to their base, and stretched along the narrow vallies.

We were on our feet at once, put together camera, glasses, aneroids, axe, Alpine rope, with some lumps of pemmican to eat on the way, and then went off for a morning walk with the nearer of the two hills as our goal.

In short, the best naturalists have written some of their best pages in describing the associations of the prairie-dogs of America, the marmots of the Old World, and the polar marmots of the Alpine regions.

One of the most memorable of all the Alpine catastrophes was that of July, 1865, on the Matterhorn--already sighted referred to, a few pages back.