Climb above about 3,300 m in a new world and the ground is no longer one beige felt. Green sedge turf lies in the hollows, along creeks and lake shores and below lingering snow, while the knobs and windward slopes are gray fell-field gravel with stones, cushion plants and sedge tufts. Summer snowfields lie in the north-facing hollows, with crisp melting edges and green turf where their water runs.
At the treeline itself, whitebark pines stand in clumps in the joints of the bare granite up to the ridgelines, lodgepoles keep to the benches, and the knee-high wind mats spread wide across the gravel and ledges, about 2.7 times the tree cover there was. Saved worlds keep their land.
