Long as it was, the slope was ended at last, and we came straight to the great upstanding granite slabs amongst which is the natural camping-place in the pass that gives access to the Grand Basin. We named that pass the Parker Pass, and the rock tower of the ridge that rises immediately above it, the most conspicuous feature of this region from below, we named the Browne Tower. The Parker-Browne party was the first to camp at this spot, for the astonishing "sourdough" pioneers made no camp at all above the low saddle of the ridge (as it then existed), but took all the way to the summit of the North Peak in one gigantic stride. The names of Parker and Browne should surely be permanently associated with this mountain they were so nearly successful in climbing, and we found no better places to name for them.

There is only one difficulty about the naming of this pass; strictly speaking, it is not a pass at all, and the writer does not know of any mountaineering term that technically describes it. Yet it should bear a name, for it is the doorway to the upper glacier, through which all those who would reach the summit must enter. On the one hand rises the Browne Tower, with the Northeast Ridge sweeping away beyond it toward the South Peak. On the other hand, the ice of the upper glacier plunges to its fall. The upstanding blocks of granite on a little level shoulder of the ridge lead around to the base of the cliffs of the Northeast Ridge, and it is around the base of those cliffs that the way lies to the midst of the Grand Basin. So the Parker Pass we call it and desire that it should be named.



[Sidenote: Karstens Ridge]

And while names are before us, the writer would ask permission to bestow another. Having nothing to his credit in the matter at all, as the narrative has already indicated, he feels free to say that in his opinion the conquest of the difficulties of the earthquake-shattered ridge was an exploit that called for high qualities of judgment and cautious daring, and would, he thinks, be considered a brilliant piece of mountaineering anywhere in the world. He would like to name that ridge Karstens Ridge, in honor of the man who, with Walter's help, cut that staircase three miles long amid the perilous complexities of its chaotic ice-blocks.

When we reached the Parker Pass all the world beneath us was shrouded in dense mist, but all above us was bathed in bright sunshine. The great slabs of granite were like a gateway through which the Grand Basin opened to our view.

The ice of the upper glacier, which fills the Grand Basin, came terracing down from some four thousand feet above us and six miles beyond us, with progressive leaps of jagged blue serac between the two peaks of the mountain, and, almost at our feet, fell away with cataract curve to its precipitation four thousand feet below us. Across the glacier were the sheer, dark cliffs of the North Peak, soaring to an almost immediate summit twenty thousand feet above the sea; on the left, in the distance, was just visible the receding snow dome of the South Peak, with its two horns some five hundred feet higher. The mists were passing from the distant summits, curtain after curtain of gauze draping their heads for a moment and sweeping on.

We made our camp between the granite slabs on the natural camping site that offered itself, and a shovel and an empty alcohol-can proclaimed that our predecessors of last year had done the same.

The next morning the weather had almost completely cleared, and the view below us burst upon our eyes as we came out of the tent into the still air.

[Sidenote: Parker Pass]

The Parker Pass is the most splendid coigne of vantage on the whole mountain, except the summit itself. From an elevation of something more than fifteen thousand feet one overlooks the whole Alaskan range, and the scope of view to the east, to the northeast, and to the southeast is uninterrupted. Mountain range rises beyond mountain range, until only the snowy summits are visible in the great distance, and one knows that beyond the last of them lies the open sea. The near-by peaks and ridges, red with granite or black with shale and gullied from top to bottom with snow and ice, the broad highways of the glaciers at their feet carrying parallel moraines that look like giant tram-lines, stand out with vivid distinction. A lofty peak, that we suppose is Mount Hunter, towers above the lesser summits. The two arms of the Muldrow Glacier start right in the foreground and reveal themselves from their heads to their junction and then to the terminal snout, receiving their groaning tributaries from every evacuating height. The dim blue lowlands, now devoid of snow, stretch away to the northeast, with threads of stream and patches of lake that still carry ice along their banks.

And all this splendor and diversity yielded itself up to us at once; that was the most sensational and spectacular feature of it. We went to sleep in a smother of mist; we had seen nothing as we climbed; we rose to a clear, sparkling day. The clouds were mysteriously rolling away from the lowest depths; the last wisps of vapor were sweeping over the ultimate heights. Here one would like to camp through a whole week of fine weather could such a week ever be counted upon. Higher than any point in the United States, the top of the Browne Tower probably on a level with the top of Mount Blanc, it is yet not so high as to induce the acute breathlessness from which the writer suffered, later, upon any exertion. The climbing of the tower, the traversing to the other side of it, the climbing of the ridge, would afford pleasant excursions, while the opportunity for careful though difficult photography would be unrivalled. Even in thick weather the clouds are mostly below; and their rapid movement, the kaleidoscopic changes which their coming and going, their thickening and thinning, their rising and falling produce, are a never-failing source of interest and pleasure. The changes of light and shade, the gradations of color, were sometimes wonderfully delicate and charming. Seen through rapidly attenuating mist, the bold crags of the icy ridge between the glacier arms in the foreground would give a soft French gray that became a luminous mauve before it sprang into dazzling black and white in the sunshine. In the sunshine, indeed, the whole landscape was hard and brilliant, and lacked half-tones, as in the main it lacked color; but when the vapor drew the gauze of its veil over it there came rich, soft, elusive tints that were no more than hinted ere they were gone.



[Sidenote: The Himalayas]

Here, with nothing but rock and ice and snow around, nine thousand feet above any sort of vegetation even in the summer, it was of interest to remember that at the same altitude in the Himalayas good crops of barley and millet are raised and apples are grown, while at a thousand feet or so lower the apricot is ripened on the terrace-gardens.

Karstens and Walter had brought up a load each on their reconnoissance trip; four heavy loads had been brought the day before. There were yet two loads to be carried up from the cache below the cleavage, and Tatum and Walter, always ready to take the brunt of it, volunteered to bring them. So down that dreadful ridge once more the boys went, while Karstens and the writer prospected ahead for a route into the Grand Basin.

The storms and snows of ten or a dozen winters may make a "steep but practicable snow slope" of the Northeast Ridge again. One winter only had passed since the convulsion that disrupted it, and already the snow was beginning to build up its gaps and chasms. All the summer through, for many hours on clear days, the sun will melt those snows and the frost at night will glaze them into ice. The more conformable ice-blocks will gradually be cemented together, while the fierce winds that beat upon the ridge will wear away the supports of the more egregious and unstable blocks, and one by one they will topple into the abyss on this side or on that. It will probably never again be the smooth, homogeneous slope it has been; "the gable" will probably always present a wide cleft, but the slopes beyond it, stripped now of their accumulated ice so as to be unclimbable, may build up again and give access to the ridge.

The point about one thousand five hundred feet above the gable, where the earthquake cleavage took place, will perhaps remain the crux of the climb. The ice-wall rises forty or fifty feet sheer, and the broken masses below it are especially difficult and precipitous, but with care and time and pains it can be surmounted even as we surmounted it. And wind and sun and storm may mollify the forbidding abruptness of even this break in the course of time.

[Sidenote: The Denali Problem]

With the exception of this ridge, Denali is not a mountain that presents special mountaineering difficulties of a technical kind. Its difficulties lie in its remoteness, its size, the great distances of snow and ice its climbing must include the passage of, the burdens that must be carried over those distances. We estimated that it was twenty miles of actual linear distance from the pass by which we reached the Muldrow Glacier to the summit. In the height of summer its snow-line will not be higher than seven thousand feet, while at the best season for climbing it, the spring, the snow-line is much lower. Its climbing is, like nearly all Alaskan problems, essentially one of transportation. But the Northeast Ridge, in its present condition, adds all the spice of sensation and danger that any man could desire.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] See illustration facing p. 40.



CHAPTER IV

THE GRAND BASIN

The reader will perhaps be able to sympathize with the feeling of elation and confidence which came to us when we had surmounted the difficulties of the ridge and had arrived at the entrance to the Grand Basin. We realized that the greater and more arduous part of our task was done and that the way now lay open before us. For so long a time this point had been the actual goal of our efforts, for so long a time we had gazed upward at it with hope deferred, that its final attainment was accompanied with no small sense of triumph and gratification and with a great accession of faith that we should reach the top of the mountain.

[Sidenote: Heat and Cold]

The ice of the glacier that fills the basin was hundreds of feet beneath us at the pass, but it rises so rapidly that by a short traverse under the cliffs of the ridge we were able to reach its surface and select a camping site thereon at about sixteen thousand feet. It was bitterly cold, with a keen wind that descended in gusts from the heights, and the slow movement of step-cutting gave the man in the rear no opportunity of warming up. Toes and fingers grew numb despite multiple socks within mammoth moccasins and thick gloves within fur mittens.

From this time, during our stay in the Grand Basin and until we had left it and descended again, the weather progressively cleared and brightened until all clouds were dispersed. From time to time there were fresh descents of vapor, and even short snow-storms, but there was no general enveloping of the mountain again. Cold it was, at times even in the sunshine, with "a nipping and an eager air," but when the wind ceased it would grow intensely hot. On the 4th June, at 3 P. M., the thermometer in the full sunshine rose to 50 deg. F.—the highest temperature recorded on the whole excursion—and the fatigue of packing in that thin atmosphere with the sun's rays reflected from ice and snow everywhere was most exhausting. We were burned as brown as Indians; lips and noses split and peeled in spite of continual applications of lanoline, but, thanks to those most beneficent amber snow-glasses, no one of the party had the slightest trouble with his eyes. At night it was always cold, 10 deg. below zero being the highest minimum during our stay in the Grand Basin, and 21 deg. below zero the lowest. But we always slept warm; with sheep-skins and caribou-skins under us, and down quilts and camel's-hair blankets and a wolf-robe for bedding, the four of us lay in that six-by-seven tent, in one bed, snug and comfortable. It was disgraceful overcrowding, but it was warm. The fierce little primus stove, pumped up to its limit and perfectly consuming its kerosene fuel, shot out its corona of beautiful blue flame and warmed the tight, tiny tent. The primus stove, burning seven hours on a quart of coal-oil, is a little giant for heat generation. If we had had two, so that one could have served for cooking and one for heating, we should not have suffered from the cold at all, but as it was, whenever the stew-pot went on the stove, or a pot full of ice to melt, the heat was immediately absorbed by the vessel and not distributed through the tent. But another primus stove would have been another five or six pounds to pack, and we were "heavy" all the time as it was.



[Sidenote: The Labor of Packing]

Something has already been said about the fatigue of packing, and one would not weary the reader with continual reference thereto; yet it is certain that those who have carried a pack only on the lower levels cannot conceive how enormously greater the labor is at these heights. As one rises and the density of the air is diminished, so, it would seem, the weight of the pack or the effect of the weight of the pack is in the same ratio increased. We probably moved from three hundred to two hundred and fifty pounds, decreasing somewhat as food and fuel were consumed, each time camp was advanced in the Grand Basin. We could have done with a good deal less as it fell out, but this we did not know, and we were resolved not to be defeated in our purpose by lack of supplies. But the packing of these loads, relaying them forward, and all the time steeply rising, was labor of the most exhausting and fatiguing kind, and there is no possible way in which it may be avoided in the ascent of this mountain. To roam over glaciers and scramble up peaks free and untrammelled is mountaineering in the Alps. Put a forty-pound pack on a man's back, with the knowledge that to-morrow he must go down for another, and you have mountaineering in Alaska. In the ascent of this twenty-thousand-foot mountain every member of the party climbed at least sixty thousand feet. It is this going down and doing it all over again that is the heart-breaking part of climbing.



It was in the Grand Basin that the writer began to be seriously affected by the altitude, to be disturbed by a shortness of breath that with each advance grew more distressingly acute. While at rest he was not troubled; mere existence imposed no unusual burden, but even a slight exertion would be followed by a spell of panting, and climbing with a pack was interrupted at every dozen or score of steps by the necessity of stopping to regain breath. There was no nausea or headache or any other symptom of "mountain sickness." Indeed, it is hard for us to understand that affection as many climbers describe it. It has been said again and again to resemble seasickness in all its symptoms. Now the writer is of the unfortunate company that are seasick on the slightest provocation. Even rough water on the wide stretches of the lower Yukon, when a wind is blowing upstream and the launch is pitching and tossing, will give him qualms. But no one of the four of us had any such feeling on the mountain at any time. Shortness of breath we all suffered from, though none other so acutely as myself. When it was evident that the progress of the party was hindered by the constant stops on my account, the contents of my pack were distributed amongst the others and my load reduced to the mercurial barometer and the instruments, and, later, to the mercurial barometer alone. It was some mortification not to be able to do one's share of the packing, but there was no help for it, and the other shoulders were young and strong and kindly.

[Sidenote: Tobacco]

With some hope of improving his wind, the writer had reduced his smoking to two pipes a day so soon as the head of the glacier had been reached, and had abandoned tobacco altogether when camp was first made on the ridge; but it is questionable if smoking in moderation has much or any effect. Karstens, who smoked continually, and Walter, who had never smoked in his life, had the best wind of the party. It is probably much more a matter of age. Karstens was a man of thirty-two years, and the two boys were just twenty-one, while the writer approached fifty. None of us slept as well as usual except Walter—and nothing ever interferes with his sleep—but, although our slumbers were short and broken, they seemed to bring recuperation just as though they had been sound. We arose fresh in the morning though we had slept little and light.

On the 30th May we had made our camp at the Parker Pass; on the 2d June, the finest and brightest day in three weeks, we moved to our first camp in the Grand Basin. On the 3d June we moved camp again, out into the middle of the glacier, at about sixteen thousand five hundred feet.

Here we were at the upper end of one of the flats of the glacier that fills the Grand Basin, the serac of another great rise just above us. The walls of the North Peak grow still more striking and picturesque here, where they attain their highest elevation. These granite ramparts, falling three thousand feet sheer, swell out into bellying buttresses with snow slopes between them as they descend to the glacier floor, while on top, above the granite, each peak point and crest ridge is tipped with black shale. How comes that ugly black shale, with the fragments of which all the lower glacier is strewn, to have such lofty eminence and granite-guarded distinction, as though it were the most beautiful or the most valuable thing in the world? The McKinley Fork of the Kantishna, which drains the Muldrow, is black as ink with it, and its presence can be detected in the Tanana River itself as far as its junction with the Yukon. It is largely soluble in water, and where melting snow drips over it on the glacier walls below were great splotches, for all the world as though a gigantic ink-pot had been upset.



[Sidenote: The Flagstaff]

While we sat resting awhile on our way to this camp, gazing at these pinnacles of the North Peak, we fell to talking about the pioneer climbers of this mountain who claimed to have set a flagstaff near the summit of the North Peak—as to which feat a great deal of incredulity existed in Alaska for several reasons—and we renewed our determination that, if the weather permitted when we had reached our goal and ascended the South Peak, we would climb the North Peak also to seek for traces of this earliest exploit on Denali, which is dealt with at length in another place in this book. All at once Walter cried out: "I see the flagstaff!" Eagerly pointing to the rocky prominence nearest the summit—the summit itself is covered with snow—he added: "I see it plainly!" Karstens, looking where he pointed, saw it also, and, whipping out the field-glasses, one by one we all looked, and saw it distinctly standing out against the sky. With the naked eye I was never able to see it unmistakably, but through the glasses it stood out, sturdy and strong, one side covered with crusted snow. We were greatly rejoiced that we could carry down positive confirmation of this matter. It was no longer necessary for us to ascend the North Peak.

The upper glacier also bore plain signs of the earthquake that had shattered the ridge. Huge blocks of ice were strewn upon it, ripped off the left-hand wall, but it was nowhere crevassed as badly as the lower glacier, but much more broken up into serac. Some of the bergs presented very beautiful sights, wind-carved incrustations of snow in cameo upon their blue surface giving a suggestion of Wedgwood pottery. All tints seemed more delicate and beautiful up here than on the lower glacier.

On the 5th June we advanced to about seventeen thousand five hundred feet right up the middle of the glacier. As we rose that morning slowly out of the flat in which our tent was pitched and began to climb the steep serac, clouds that had been gathering below swept rapidly up into the Grand Basin, and others swept as rapidly over the summits and down upon us. In a few moments we were in a dense smother of vapor with nothing visible a couple of hundred yards away. Then the temperature dropped, and soon snow was falling which increased to a heavy snow-storm that raged an hour. We made our camp and ate our lunch, and by that time the smother of vapor passed, the sun came out hot again, and we were all simultaneously overtaken with a deep drowsiness and slept. Then out into the glare again, to go down and bring up the remainder of the stuff, we went, and that night we were established in our last camp but one. We had decided to go up at least five hundred feet farther that we might have the less to climb when we made our final attack upon the peak. So when we returned with the loads from below we did not stop at camp, but carried them forward and cached them against to-morrow's final move.



[Sidenote: Last Camp]

On Friday, the 6th June, we made our last move and pitched our tent in a flat near the base of the ridge, just below the final rise in the glacier of the Grand Basin, at about eighteen thousand feet, and we were able to congratulate one another on making the highest camp ever made in North America. I set up and read the mercurial barometer, and when corrected for its own temperature it stood at 15.061. The boiling-point thermometer registered 180.5, as the point at which water boiled, with an air temperature of 35 deg. It took one hour to boil the rice for supper. The aneroids stood at 14.8 and 14.9, still steadily losing on the mercurial barometer. I think that a rough altitude gauge could be calculated from the time rice takes to boil—at least as reliable as an aneroid barometer. At the Parker Pass it took fifty minutes; here it took sixty. This is about the height of perpetual snow on the great Himalayan peaks; but we had been above the perpetual snow-line for forty-eight days.

We were now within about two thousand five hundred feet of the summit and had two weeks' full supply of food and fuel, which, at a pinch, could be stretched to three weeks. Certain things were short: the chocolate and figs and raisins and salt were low; of the zwieback there remained but two and one-half packages, reserved against lunch when we attacked the summit. But the meatballs, the erbswurst, the caribou jelly, the rice, and the tea—our staples—were abundant for two weeks, with four gallons of coal-oil and a gallon of alcohol. The end of our painful transportation hither was accomplished; we were within one day's climb of the summit with supplies to besiege. If the weather should prove persistently bad we could wait; we could advance our parallels; could put another camp on the ridge itself at nineteen thousand feet, and yet another half-way up the dome. If we had to fight our way step by step and could advance but a couple of hundred feet a day, we were still confident that, barring unforeseeable misfortunes, we could reach the top. But we wanted a clear day on top, that the observations we designed to make could be made; it would be a poor success that did but set our feet on the highest point. And we felt sure that, prepared as we were to wait, the clear day would come.



As so often happens when everything unpropitious is guarded against, nothing unpropitious occurs. It would have been a wonderful chance, indeed, if, supplied only for one day, a fine, clear day had come. But supplied against bad weather for two or three weeks, it was no wonder at all that the very first day should have presented itself bright and clear. We had exhausted our bad fortune below; here, at the juncture above all others at which we should have chosen to enjoy it, we were to encounter our good fortune.

[Sidenote: Breathlessness]

But here, where all signs seemed to promise success to the expedition, the author began to have fears of personal failure. The story of Mr. Fitzgerald's expedition to Aconcagua came to his mind, and he recalled that, although every other member of the party reached the summit, that gentleman himself was unable to do so. In the last stage the difficulty of breathing had increased with fits of smothering, and the medicine chest held no remedy for blind staggers.



CHAPTER V

THE ULTIMATE HEIGHT

We lay down for a few hours on the night of the 6th June, resolved to rise at three in the morning for our attempt upon the summit of Denali. At supper Walter had made a desperate effort to use some of our ten pounds of flour in the manufacture of "noodles" with which to thicken the stew. We had continued to pack that flour and had made effort after effort to cook it in some eatable way, but without success. The sour dough would not ferment, and we had no baking-powder. Is there any way to cook flour under such circumstances? But he made the noodles too large and did not cook them enough, and they wrought internal havoc upon those who partook of them. Three of the four of us were unwell all night. The digestion is certainly more delicate and more easily disturbed at great altitudes than at the lower levels. While Karstens and Tatum were tossing uneasily in the bedclothes, the writer sat up with a blanket round his shoulders, crouching over the primus stove, with the thermometer at -21 deg. F. outdoors. Walter alone was at ease, with digestive and somnolent capabilities proof against any invasion. It was, of course, broad daylight all night. At three the company was aroused, and, after partaking of a very light breakfast indeed, we sallied forth into the brilliant, clear morning with not a cloud in the sky. The only packs we carried that day were the instruments and the lunch. The sun was shining, but a keen north wind was blowing and the thermometer stood at -4 deg. F. We were rather a sorry company. Karstens still had internal pains; Tatum and I had severe headaches. Walter was the only one feeling entirely himself, so Walter was put in the lead and in the lead he remained all day.



[Sidenote: Start to the Summit]

[Sidenote: Cold]

We took a straight course up the great snow ridge directly south of our camp and then around the peak into which it rises; quickly told but slowly and most laboriously done. It was necessary to make the traverse high up on this peak instead of around its base, so much had its ice and snow been shattered by the earthquake on the lower portions. Once around this peak, there rose before us the horseshoe ridge which carries the ultimate height of Denali, a horseshoe ridge of snow opening to the east with a low snow peak at either end, the centre of the ridge soaring above both peaks. Above us was nothing visible but snow; the rocks were all beneath, the last rocks standing at about 19,000 feet. Our progress was exceedingly slow. It was bitterly cold; all the morning toes and fingers were without sensation, kick them and beat them as we would. We were all clad in full winter hand and foot gear—more gear than had sufficed at 50 deg. below zero on the Yukon trail. Within the writer's No. 16 moccasins were three pairs of heavy hand-knitted woollen socks, two pairs of camel's-hair socks, and a pair of thick felt socks; while underneath them, between them and the iron "creepers," were the soles cut from a pair of felt shoes. Upon his hands were a pair of the thickest Scotch wool gloves, thrust inside huge lynx-paw mitts lined with Hudson Bay duffle. His moose-hide breeches and shirt, worn all the winter on the trail, were worn throughout this climb; over the shirt was a thick sweater and over all the usual Alaskan "parkee" amply furred around the hood; underneath was a suit of the heaviest Jaeger underwear—yet until nigh noon feet were like lumps of iron and fingers were constantly numb. That north wind was cruelly cold, and there can be no possible question that cold is felt much more keenly in the thin air of nineteen thousand feet than it is below. But the north wind was really our friend, for nothing but a north wind will drive all vapor from this mountain. Karstens beat his feet so violently and so continually against the hard snow to restore the circulation that two of his toe-nails sloughed off afterward. By eleven o'clock we had been climbing for six hours and were well around the peak, advancing toward the horseshoe ridge, but even then there were grave doubts if we should succeed in reaching it that day, it was so cold. A hint from any member of the party that his feet were actually freezing—a hint expected all along—would have sent us all back. When there is no sensation left in the feet at all it is, however, difficult to be quite sure if they be actually freezing or not—and each one was willing to give the attempt upon the summit the benefit of the doubt. What should we have done with the ordinary leather climbing boots? But once entirely around the peak we were in a measure sheltered from the north wind, and the sun full upon us gave more warmth. It was hereabouts, and not, surely, at the point indicated in the photograph in Mr. Belmore Browne's book, that the climbing party of last year was driven back by the blizzard that descended upon them when close to their goal. Not until we had stopped for lunch and had drunk the scalding tea from the thermos bottles, did we all begin to have confidence that this day would see the completion of the ascent. But the writer's shortness of breath became more and more distressing as he rose. The familiar fits of panting took a more acute form; at such times everything would turn black before his eyes and he would choke and gasp and seem unable to get breath at all. Yet a few moments' rest restored him completely, to struggle on another twenty or thirty paces and to sink gasping upon the snow again. All were more affected in the breathing than they had been at any time before—it was curious to see every man's mouth open for breathing—but none of the others in this distressing way. Before the traverse around the peak just mentioned, Walter had noticed the writer's growing discomfort and had insisted upon assuming the mercurial barometer. The boy's eager kindness was gladly accepted and the instrument was surrendered. So it did not fall to the writer's credit to carry the thing to the top as he had wished.

[Sidenote: Climbing-Irons]

The climbing grew steeper and steeper; the slope that had looked easy from below now seemed to shoot straight up. For the most part the climbing-irons gave us sufficient footing, but here and there we came to softer snow, where they would not take sufficient hold and we had to cut steps. The calks in these climbing-irons were about an inch and a quarter long; we wished they had been two inches. The creepers are a great advantage in the matter of speed, but they need long points. They are not so safe as step-cutting, and there is the ever-present danger that unless one is exceedingly careful one will step upon the rope with them and their sharp calks sever some of the strands. They were, however, of great assistance and saved a deal of laborious step-cutting.

At last the crest of the ridge was reached and we stood well above the two peaks that mark the ends of the horseshoe.[4]

Also it was evident that we were well above the great North Peak across the Grand Basin. Its crest had been like an index on the snow beside us as we climbed, and we stopped for a few moments when it seemed that we were level with it. We judged it to be about five hundred feet lower than the South Peak.



But still there stretched ahead of us, and perhaps one hundred feet above us, another small ridge with a north and south pair of little haycock summits. This is the real top of Denali. From below, this ultimate ridge merges indistinguishably with the crest of the horseshoe ridge, but it is not a part of it but a culminating ridge beyond it. With keen excitement we pushed on. Walter, who had been in the lead all day, was the first to scramble up; a native Alaskan, he is the first human being to set foot upon the top of Alaska's great mountain, and he had well earned the lifelong distinction. Karstens and Tatum were hard upon his heels, but the last man on the rope, in his enthusiasm and excitement somewhat overpassing his narrow wind margin, had almost to be hauled up the last few feet, and fell unconscious for a moment upon the floor of the little snow basin that occupies the top of the mountain. This, then, is the actual summit, a little crater-like snow basin, sixty or sixty-five feet long and twenty to twenty-five feet wide, with a haycock of snow at either end—the south one a little higher than the north. On the southwest this little basin is much corniced, and the whole thing looked as though every severe storm might somewhat change its shape.

So soon as wind was recovered we shook hands all round and a brief prayer of thanksgiving to Almighty God was said, that He had granted us our hearts' desire and brought us safely to the top of His great mountain.

[Sidenote: The Instrument Readings]

This prime duty done, we fell at once to our scientific tasks. The instrument-tent was set up, the mercurial barometer, taken out of its leather case and then out of its wooden case, was swung upon its tripod and a rough zero established, and it was left awhile to adjust itself to conditions before a reading was attempted. It was a great gratification to get it to the top uninjured. The boiling-point apparatus was put together and its candle lighted under the ice which filled its little cistern. The three-inch, three-circle aneroid was read at once at thirteen and two-tenths inches, its mendacious altitude scale confidently pointing at twenty-three thousand three hundred feet. Half an hour later it had dropped to 13.175 inches and had shot us up another one hundred feet into the air. Soon the water was boiling in the little tubes of the boiling-point thermometer and the steam pouring out of the vent. The thread of mercury rose to 174.9 deg. and stayed there. There is something definite and uncompromising about the boiling-point hypsometer; no tapping will make it rise or fall; it reaches its mark unmistakably and does not budge. The reading of the mercurial barometer is a slower and more delicate business. It takes a good light and a good sight to tell when the ivory zero-point is exactly touching the surface of the mercury in the cistern; it takes care and precision to get the vernier exactly level with the top of the column. It was read, some half-hour after it was set up, at 13.617 inches. The alcohol minimum thermometer stood at 7 deg. F. all the while we were on top. Meanwhile, Tatum had been reading a round of angles with the prismatic compass. He could not handle it with sufficient exactness with his mitts on, and he froze his fingers doing it barehanded.

[Sidenote: The View]

The scientific work accomplished, then and not till then did we indulge ourselves in the wonderful prospect that stretched around us. It was a perfectly clear day, the sun shining brightly in the sky, and naught bounded our view save the natural limitations of vision. Immediately before us, in the direction in which we had climbed, lay—nothing: a void, a sheer gulf many thousands of feet deep, and one shrank back instinctively from the little parapet of the snow basin when one had glanced at the awful profundity. Across the gulf, about three thousand feet beneath us and fifteen or twenty miles away, sprang most splendidly into view the great mass of Denali's Wife, or Mount Foraker, as some white men misname her, filling majestically all the middle distance. It was our first glimpse of her during the whole ascent. Denali's Wife does not appear at all save from the actual summit of Denali, for she is completely hidden by his South Peak until the moment when his South Peak is surmounted. And never was nobler sight displayed to man than that great, isolated mountain spread out completely, with all its spurs and ridges, its cliffs and its glaciers, lofty and mighty and yet far beneath us. On that spot one understood why the view of Denali from Lake Minchumina is the grand view, for the west face drops abruptly down with nothing but that vast void from the top to nigh the bottom of the mountain. Beyond stretched, blue and vague to the southwest, the wide valley of the Kuskokwim, with an end of all mountains. To the north we looked right over the North Peak to the foot-hills below, patched with lakes and lingering snow, glittering with streams. We had hoped to see the junction of the Yukon and Tanana Rivers, one hundred and fifty miles away to the northwest, as we had often and often seen the summit of Denali from that point in the winter, but the haze that almost always qualifies a fine summer day inhibited that stretch of vision. Perhaps the forest-fires we found raging on the Tanana River were already beginning to foul the northern sky.



It was, however, to the south and the east that the most marvellous prospect opened before us. What infinite tangle of mountain ranges filled the whole scene, until gray sky, gray mountain, and gray sea merged in the ultimate distance! The near-by peaks and ridges stood out with dazzling distinction, the glaciation, the drainage, the relation of each part to the others all revealed. The snow-covered tops of the remoter peaks, dwindling and fading, rose to our view as though floating in thin air when their bases were hidden by the haze, and the beautiful crescent curve of the whole Alaskan range exhibited itself from Denali to the sea. To the right hand the glittering, tiny threads of streams draining the mountain range into the Chulitna and Sushitna Rivers, and so to Cook's Inlet and the Pacific Ocean, spread themselves out; to the left the affluents of the Kantishna and the Nenana drained the range into the Yukon and Bering Sea.

Yet the chief impression was not of our connection with the earth so far below, its rivers and its seas, but rather of detachment from it. We seemed alone upon a dead world, as dead as the mountains on the moon. Only once before can the writer remember a similar feeling of being neither in the world nor of the world, and that was at the bottom of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, in Arizona, its savage granite walls as dead as this savage peak of ice.

[Sidenote: The Dark Sky]

Above us the sky took a blue so deep that none of us had ever gazed upon a midday sky like it before. It was a deep, rich, lustrous, transparent blue, as dark as a Prussian blue, but intensely blue; a hue so strange, so increasingly impressive, that to one at least it "seemed like special news of God," as a new poet sings. We first noticed the darkening tint of the upper sky in the Grand Basin, and it deepened as we rose. Tyndall observed and discussed this phenomenon in the Alps, but it seems scarcely to have been mentioned since.

It is difficult to describe at all the scene which the top of the mountain presented, and impossible to describe it adequately. One was not occupied with the thought of description but wholly possessed with the breadth and glory of it, with its sheer, amazing immensity and scope. Only once, perhaps, in any lifetime is such vision granted, certainly never before had been vouchsafed to any of us. Not often in the summer-time does Denali completely unveil himself and dismiss the clouds from all the earth beneath. Yet we could not linger, unique though the occasion, dearly bought our privilege; the miserable limitations of the flesh gave us continual warning to depart; we grew colder and still more wretchedly cold. The thermometer stood at 7 deg. in the full sunshine, and the north wind was keener than ever. My fingers were so cold that I would not venture to withdraw them from the mittens to change the film in the camera, and the other men were in like case; indeed, our hands were by this time so numb as to make it almost impossible to operate a camera at all. A number of photographs had been taken, though not half we should have liked to take, but it is probable that, however many more exposures had been made, they would have been little better than those we got. Our top-of-the-mountain photography was a great disappointment. One thing we learned: exposures at such altitude should be longer than those below, perhaps owing to the darkness of the sky.



[Sidenote: The Stars and Stripes]

When the mercurial barometer had been read the tent was thrown down and abandoned, the first of the series of abandonments that marked our descent from the mountain. The tent-pole was used for a moment as a flagstaff while Tatum hoisted a little United States flag he had patiently and skilfully constructed in our camps below out of two silk handkerchiefs and the cover of a sewing-bag. Then the pole was put to its permanent use. It had already been carved with a suitable inscription, and now a transverse piece, already prepared and fitted, was lashed securely to it and it was planted on one of the little snow turrets of the summit—the sign of our redemption, high above North America. Only some peaks in the Andes and some peaks in the Himalayas rise above it in all the world. It was of light, dry birch and, though six feet in length, so slender that we think it may weather many a gale. And Walter thrust it into the snow so firmly at a blow that it could not be withdrawn again. Then we gathered about it and said the Te Deum.



It was 1.30 P. M. when we reached the summit and two minutes past three when we left; yet so quickly had the time flown that we could not believe we had been an hour and a half on top. The journey down was a long, weary grind, the longer and the wearier that we made a detour and went out of our way to seek for Professor Parker's thermometer, which he had left "in a crack on the west side of the last boulder of the northeast ridge." That sounds definite enough, yet in fact it is equivocal. "Which is the last boulder?" we disputed as we went down the slope. A long series of rocks almost in line came to an end, with one rock a little below the others, a little out of the line. This egregious boulder would, it seemed to me, naturally be called the last; Karstens thought not—thought the "last boulder" was the last on the ridge. As we learned later, Karstens was right, and since he yielded to me we did not find the thermometer, for, having descended to this isolated rock, we would not climb up again for fifty thermometers. One's disappointment is qualified by the knowledge that the thermometer is probably not of adequate scale, Professor Parker's recollection being that it read only to 60 deg. below zero, F. A lower temperature than this is recorded every winter on the Yukon River.

[Sidenote: Possible Temperatures]

A thermometer reading to 100 deg. below zero, left at this spot, would, in my judgment, perhaps yield a lower minimum than has ever yet been authentically recorded on earth, and it is most unfortunate that the opportunity was lost. Yet I did not leave my own alcohol minimum—scaled to 95 deg. below zero, and yielding, by estimation, perhaps ten degrees below the scaling—there, because of the difficulty of giving explicit directions that should lead to its ready recovery, and at the close of such a day of toil as is involved in reaching the summit, men have no stomach for prolonged search. As will be told, it is cached lower down, but at a spot where it cannot be missed.

However, for one, the writer was largely unconscious of weariness in that descent. All the way down, my thoughts were occupied with the glorious scene my eyes had gazed upon and should gaze upon never again. In all human probability I would never climb that mountain again; yet if I climbed it a score more times I would never be likely to repeat such vision. Commonly, only for a few hours at a time, never for more than a few days at a time, save in the dead of winter when climbing is out of the question, does Denali completely unveil himself and dismiss the clouds from all the earth beneath him. Not for long, with these lofty colds contiguous, will the vapors of Cook's Inlet and Prince William Sound and the whole North Pacific Ocean refrain from sweeping upward; their natural trend is hitherward. As the needle turns to the magnet so the clouds find an irresistible attraction in this great mountain mass, and though the inner side of the range be rid of them the sea side is commonly filled to overflowing.

[Sidenote: The Te Deum]

Only those who have for long years cherished a great and almost inordinate desire, and have had that desire gratified to the limit of their expectation, can enter into the deep thankfulness and content that filled the heart upon the descent of this mountain. There was no pride of conquest, no trace of that exultation of victory some enjoy upon the first ascent of a lofty peak, no gloating over good fortune that had hoisted us a few hundred feet higher than others who had struggled and been discomfited. Rather was the feeling that a privileged communion with the high places of the earth had been granted; that not only had we been permitted to lift up eager eyes to these summits, secret and solitary since the world began, but to enter boldly upon them, to take place, as it were, domestically in their hitherto sealed chambers, to inhabit them, and to cast our eyes down from them, seeing all things as they spread out from the windows of heaven itself.

Into this strong yet serene emotion, into this reverent elevation of spirit, came with a shock a recollection of some recent reading.

Oh, wisdom of man and the apparatus of the sciences, the little columns of mercury that sling up and down, the vacuum boxes that expand and contract, the hammer that chips the highest rocks, the compass that takes the bearings of glacier and ridge—all the equipage of hypsometry and geology and geodesy—how pitifully feeble and childish it seems to cope with the majesty of the mountains! Take them all together, haul them up the steep, and as they lie there, read, recorded, and done for, which shall be more adequate to the whole scene—their records?—or that simple, ancient hymn, "We praise Thee, O God!—Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of Thy Glory!" What an astonishing thing that, standing where we stood and seeing what we saw, there are men who should be able to deduce this law or that from their observation of its working and yet be unable to see the Lawgiver!—who should be able to push back effect to immediate cause and yet be blind to the Supreme Cause of All Causes; who can say, "This is the glacier's doing and it is marvellous in our eyes," and not see Him "Who in His Strength setteth fast the mountains and is girded with power," Whose servants the glaciers, the snow, and the ice are, "wind and storm fulfilling His Word"; who exult in the exercise of their own intelligences and the playthings those intelligences have constructed and yet deny the Omniscience that endowed them with some minute fragment of Itself! It was not always so; it was not so with the really great men who have advanced our knowledge of nature. But of late years hordes of small men have given themselves up to the study of the physical sciences without any study preliminary. It would almost seem nowadays that whoever can sit in the seat of the scornful may sit in the seat of learning.

[Sidenote: The Scientists]

A good many years ago, on an occasion already referred to, the writer roamed through the depths of the Grand Canyon with a chance acquaintance who described himself as "Herpetologist to the Academy of Sciences" in some Western or Mid-Western State, and as this gentleman found the curious little reptiles he was in search of under a root or in a cranny of rock he repeated their many-syllabled names. Curious to know what these names literally meant and whence derived, the writer made inquiry, sometimes hazarding a conjectural etymology. To his astonishment and dismay he found this "scientist," whom he had looked up to, entirely ignorant of the meaning of the terms he employed. They were just arbitrary terms to him. The little hopping and crawling creatures might as well have been numbered, or called x, y, z, for any significance their formidable nomenclature held for him. Yet this man had been keenly sarcastic about the Noachian deluge and had jeered from the height of his superiority at hoary records which he knew only at second-hand reference, and had laid it down that if the human race became extinct the birds would stand the best chance of "evolving a primate"! Since that time other "scientists" have been encountered, with no better equipment, with no history, no poetry, no philosophy in any broad sense, men with no letters—illiterate, strictly speaking—yet with all the dogmatism in the world. Can any one be more dogmatic than your modern scientist? The reproach has passed altogether to him from the theologian.

The thing grows, and its menace and scandal grow with it. Since coming "outside" the writer has encountered a professor at a college, a Ph.D. of a great university, who confessed that he had never heard of certain immortal characters of Dickens whose names are household words. We shall have to open Night-Schools for Scientists, where men who have been deprived of all early advantages may learn the rudiments of English literature. One wishes that Dickens himself might have dealt with their pretensions, but they are since his day. And surely it is time some one started a movement for suppressing illiterate Ph.D.'s.

[Sidenote: The Psalmist and Dr. Johnson]

Of this class, one feels sure, are the scientific heroes of the sensational articles in the monthly magazines of the baser sort, of which we picked up a number in the Kantishna on our way to the mountain. Here, in a picture that seems to have obtruded itself bodily into a page of letter-press, or else to have suffered the accidental irruption of a page of letter-press all around it, you shall see a grave scientist looking anxiously down a very large microscope, and shall read that he has transferred a kidney from a cat to a dog, and therefore we can no longer believe in the immortality of the soul; or else that he has succeeded in artificially fertilizing the ova of a starfish—or was it a jellyfish?—and therefore there is no God; not just in so many bald words, of course, but in unmistakable import. Or it may be—so commonly does the crassest credulity go hand in hand with the blankest scepticism—he has discovered the germ of old age and is hot upon the track of another germ that shall destroy it, so that we may all live virtually as long as we like; which, of course, disposes once for all of a world to come. The Psalmist was not always complaisant or even temperate in his language, but he lived a long time ago and must be pardoned; his curt summary stands: "Dixit insipiens!" But the writer vows that if he were addicted to the pursuit of any branch of physical knowledge he would insist upon being called by the name of that branch. He would be a physiologist or a biologist or an anatomist or even a herpetologist, but none should call him "scientist." As Doll Tearsheet says in the second part of "King Henry IV": "These villains will make the word as odious as the word 'occupy'; which was an excellent good word before it was ill-sorted." If Doctor Johnson were compiling an English dictionary to-day he would define "scientist" something thus: "A cant name for an experimenter in some department of physical knowledge, commonly furnished with arrogance and dogmatism, but devoid of real learning."

Here is no gibe at the physical sciences. To sneer at them were just as foolish as to sneer at religion. What we could do on this expedition in a "scientific" way we did laboriously and zealously. We would never have thought of attempting the ascent of the mountain without bringing back whatever little addition to human knowledge was within the scope of our powers and opportunities. Tatum took rounds of angles, in practice against the good fortune of a clear day on top, on every possible occasion. The sole personal credit the present writer takes concerning the whole enterprise is the packing of that mercurial barometer on his back, from the Tanana River nearly to the top of the mountain, a point at which he was compelled to relinquish it to another. He has always had his opinion about mountain climbers who put an aneroid in their pocket and go to the top of a great, new peak and come down confidently announcing its height. But when all this business is done as closely and carefully as possible, and every observation taken that there are instruments devised to record, surely the soul is dead that feels no more and sees no further than the instruments do, that stirs with no other emotion than the mercury in the tube or the dial at its point of suspension, that is incapable of awe, of reverence, of worshipful uplift, and does not feel that "the Lord even the most mighty God hath spoken, and called the world from the rising of the sun even to the going down of the same," in the wonders displayed before his eyes.

* * * * *

We reached our eighteen-thousand-foot camp about five o'clock, a weary but happy crew. It was written in the diary that night: "I remember no day in my life so full of toil, distress, and exhaustion, and yet so full of happiness and keen gratification."

[Sidenote: The Amber Glasses Again]

The culminating day should not be allowed to pass without another tribute to the efficiency of the amber glasses. Notwithstanding the glare of the sun at twenty thousand feet and upward, no one had the slightest irritation of the eyes. There has never been an April of travel on the Yukon in eight years that the writer has not suffered from inflammation of the eyes despite the darkest smoke-colored glasses that could be procured. A naked candle at a road-house would give a stab of pain every time the eyes encountered it, and reading would become almost impossible. The amber glasses, however, while leaving vision almost as bright as without them, filter out the rays that cause the irritation and afford perfect protection against the consequences of sun and glare. There is only one improvement to make in the amber glasses, and that is some device of air-tight cells that shall prevent them from fogging when the cold on the outside of the glass condenses the moisture of perspiration on the inside of the glass. We use double-glazed sashes with an air space between on all windows in our houses in Alaska and find ourselves no longer incommoded by frost on the panes; some adaptation of this principle should be within the skill of the optician and would remove a very troublesome defect in all snow-glasses.

If some one would invent a preventive against shortness of breath as efficient as amber glasses are against snow-blindness, climbing at great altitudes would lose all its terrors for one mountaineer. So far as it was possible to judge, no other member of the party was near his altitude limit. There seemed no reason why Karstens and Walter in particular should not go another ten thousand feet, were there a mountain in the world ten thousand feet higher than Denali, but the writer knows that he himself could not have gone much higher.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] The dotted line on the photograph opposite page 346 of Mr. Belmore Browne's book, "The Conquest of Mt. McKinley," does not, in the writer's opinion, represent the real course taken by Professor Parker, Mr. Belmore Browne, and Merl La Voy in their approach to the summit, and it is easy to understand the confusion of direction in the fierce storm that descended upon the party. If, as the dots show, the party went to the summit of the right-hand peak, they went out of their way and had still a considerable distance to travel. "Perhaps five minutes of easy walking would have taken us to the highest point," says Mr. Browne. It is probably more than a mile from the summit of the snow peak shown in the picture to the actual summit of the mountain. One who took that course would have to descend from the peak and then ascend the horseshoe ridge, and the highest point of the horseshoe ridge is perhaps two hundred feet above the summit of this snow peak. In the opinion that Professor Parker expressed to the writer, the dotted lines should bear much more to the left, making directly for the centre of the horseshoe ridge, which is the obvious course. But it should again be said that men in the circumstances and condition of this party when forced to turn back, may be pardoned for mistaking the exact direction in which they had been proceeding.



CHAPTER VI

THE RETURN

The next day was another bright, cloudless day, the second and last of them. Perhaps never did men abandon as cheerfully stuff that had been freighted as laboriously as we abandoned our surplus baggage at the eighteen-thousand-foot camp. We made a great pile of it in the lee of one of the ice-blocks of the glacier—food, coal-oil, clothing, and bedding—covering all with the wolf-robe and setting up a shovel as a mark; though just why we cached it so carefully, or for whom, no one of us would be able to say. It will probably be a long time ere any others camp in that Grand Basin. While yet such a peak is unclimbed, there is constant goading of mountaineering minds to its conquest; once its top has been reached, the incentive declines. Much exploring work is yet to do on Denali; the day will doubtless come when all its peaks and ridges and glaciers will be duly mapped, but our view from the summit agreed with our study of its conformation during the ascent, that no other route will be found to the top. When first we were cutting and climbing on the ridge, and had glimpses, as the mists cleared, of the glacier on the other side and the ridges that arose from it, we thought that perhaps they might afford a passage, but from above the appearance changed and seemed to forbid it altogether. At times, almost in despair at the task which the Northeast Ridge presented, we would look across at the ice-covered rocks of the North Peak and dream that they might be climbed, but they are really quite impossible. The south side has been tried again and again and no approach discovered, nor did it appear from the top that such approach exists; the west side is sheer precipice; the north side is covered with a great hanging glacier and is devoid of practicable slopes; it has been twice attempted. Only on the northeast has the glacier cut so deeply into the mountain as to give access to the heights.

June 8th was Sunday, but we had to take advantage of the clear, bright day to get as far down the mountain as possible. The stuff it was still necessary to pack made good, heavy loads, and we knew not what had happened to our staircase in our absence.

[Sidenote: The Record]

Having said Morning Prayer, we left at 9.30 A. M., after a night in which all of us slept soundly—the first sound sleep some had enjoyed for a long time. Contentment and satisfaction are great somnifacients. The Grand Basin was glorious in sunshine, the peaks crystal-clear against a cloudless sky, the huge blocks of ice thrown down by the earthquake and scattered all over the glacier gleamed white in the sunshine, deep-blue in the shadow. We wound our way downward, passing camp site after camp site, until at the first place we camped in the Grand Basin we stopped for lunch. Then we made the traverse under the cliffs to the Parker Pass, which we reached at 1.30 P. M. The sun was hot; there was not a breath of wind; we were exceedingly thirsty and we decided to light the primus stove and make a big pot of tea and replenish the thermos bottles before attempting the descent of the ridge. While this was doing a place was found to cache the minimum thermometer and a tin can that had held a photographic film, in which we had placed a record of our ascent. Above, we had not found any distinctive place in which a record could be deposited with the assurance that it would be found by any one seeking it. One feels sure that in the depth of winter very great cold must occur even at this elevation. Yet we should have liked to leave it much higher. Without some means, which we did not possess, of marking a position, there would, however, have been little use in leaving it amid the boulders where we hunted unsuccessfully for Professor Parker's instrument. We had hoped to be able to grave some sign upon the rocks with the geological hammer, but the first time it was brought down upon the granite its point splintered in the same exasperating way that the New York dealer's fancy ice-axes behaved when it was attempted to put them to practical use. "Warranted cast steel" upon an implement ought to be a warning not to purchase it for mountain work. Tool-steel alone will serve.

Our little record cache at the Parker Pass, placed at the foot of the west or upward-facing side of the great slab which marks the natural camping site, should stand there for many years. It is not a place where snow lies deep or long, and it will surely be found by any who seek it. We took our last looks up into the Grand Basin, still brilliant in the sunshine, our last looks at the summit, still cloudless and clear. There was a melancholy even in the midst of triumph in looking for the last time at these scenes where we had so greatly hoped and endeavored—and had been so amply rewarded. We recalled the eager expectation with which we first gazed up between these granite slabs into the long-hidden basin, a week before, and there was sadness in the feeling that in all probability we should never have this noble view again.

[Sidenote: Harper Glacier]

Before the reader turns his back upon the Grand Basin once for all, I should like to put a name upon the glacier it contains—since it is the fashion to name glaciers. I should like to call it the Harper Glacier, after my half-breed companion of three years, who was the first human being to reach the summit of the mountain. This reason might suffice, but there is another and most interesting reason for associating the name Harper with this mountain. Arthur Harper, Walter's father, the pioneer of all Alaskan miners, "the first man who thought of trying the Yukon as a mining field so far as we know," as William Ogilvie tells us in his "Early Days on the Yukon"[5] (and none had better opportunity of knowing than Ogilvie), was also the first man to make written reference to this mountain, since Vancouver, the great navigator, saw it from the head of Cook's Inlet in 1794.

Arthur Harper, in company with Al. Mayo, made the earliest exploration of the Tanana River, ascending that stream in the summer of 1878 to about the present site of Fairbanks; and in a letter to E. W. Nelson, of the United States Biological Survey, then on the Alaskan coast, Harper wrote the following winter of the "great ice mountain to the south" as one of the most wonderful sights of the trip.[6] It is pleasant to think that a son of his, yet unborn, was to be the first to set foot on its top; pleasantly also the office of setting his name upon the lofty glacier, the gleam from which caught his eye and roused his wonder thirty years ago, falls upon one who has been glad and proud to take, in some measure, his place.

[Sidenote: Descent]

Then began the difficulty and the danger, the toil and the anxiety, of the descent of the ridge. Karstens led, then followed Tatum, then the writer, and then Walter. The unbroken surface of the ridge above the cleavage is sensationally steep, and during our absence nearly two feet of new snow had fallen upon it. The steps that had been shovelled as we ascended were entirely obliterated and it was necessary to shovel new ones; it was the very heat of the day, and by the canons of climbing we should have camped at the Pass and descended in the early morning. But all were eager to get down, and we ventured it. Now that our task was accomplished, our minds reverted to the boy at the base camp long anxiously expecting us, and we thought of him and spoke of him continually and speculated how he had fared. One feels upon reflection that we took more risk in descending that ridge than we took at any time in the ascent. But Karstens was most cautious and careful, and in the long and intensive apprenticeship of this expedition had become most expert. I sometimes wondered whether Swiss guides would have much to teach either him or Walter in snow-craft; their chief instruction would probably be along the line of taking more chances, wisely. If the writer had to ascend this mountain again he would intrust himself to Karstens and Walter rather than to any Swiss guides he has known, for ice and snow in Alaska are not quite the same as ice and snow in the Alps or the Canadian Rockies.



The loose snow was shovelled away and the steps dug in the hard snow beneath, and the creepers upon our feet gave good grip in it. Thus, slowly, step by step, we descended the ridge and in an hour and a half had reached the cleavage, the most critical place in the whole descent. With the least possible motion of the feet, setting them exactly in the shovelled steps, we crept like cats across this slope, thrusting the points of our axes into the holes that had been made in the ice-wall above, moving all together, the rope always taut, no one speaking a word. When once Karstens was anchored on the further ice he stood and gathered up the rope as first one and then another passed safely to him and anchored himself beside him, until at last we were all across. Then, stooping to pass the overhanging ice-cliff that here also disputed the pack upon one's back, we went down to the long, long stretch of jagged pinnacles and bergs, and our intricate staircase in the masonry of them. Shovelling was necessary all the way down, but the steps were there, needing only to be uncovered. Passing our ridge camp, passing the danger of the great gable, down the rocks by which we reached the ridge and down the slopes to the glacier floor we went, reaching our old camp at 9.30 P. M., six and a quarter hours from the Parker Pass, twelve hours from the eighteen-thousand-foot camp in the Grand Basin, our hearts full of thankfulness that the terrible ridge was behind us. Until we reached the glacier floor the weather had been clear; almost immediately thereafter the old familiar cloud smother began to pour down from above and we saw the heights no more.

[Sidenote: The Glacier Camp]

The camp was in pretty bad shape. The snow that had fallen upon it had melted and frozen to ice, in the sun's rays and the night frosts, and weighed the tent down to the ground. But an hour's work made it habitable again, and we gleefully piled the stove with the last of our wood and used the last spoonfuls of a can of baking-powder to make a batch of biscuits, the first bread we had eaten in two weeks.

Next day we abandoned the camp, leaving all standing, and, putting our packs upon a Yukon sled, rejecting the ice-creepers, and resuming our rough-locked snow-shoes, we started down the glacier in soft, cloudy weather to our base camp. Again it had been wiser to have waited till night, that the snow bridges over the crevasses might be at their hardest; but we could not wait. Every mind was occupied with Johnny. We were two weeks overstayed of the time we had told him to expect our return, and we knew not what might have happened to the boy. The four of us on one rope, Karstens leading and Walter at the gee-pole, we went down the first sharp descents of the glaciers without much trouble, the new, soft snow making a good brake for the sled. But lower down the crevasses began to give us trouble. The snow bridges were melted at their edges, and sometimes the sled had to be lowered down to the portion that still held and hauled up at the other side. Sometimes a bridge gave way as its edge was cautiously ventured upon with the snow-shoes, and we had to go far over to the glacier wall to get round the crevasse. The willows with which we had staked the trail still stood, sometimes just their tips appearing above the new snow, and they were a good guide, though we often had to leave the old trail. At last the crevasses were all passed and we reached the lower portion of the glacier, which is free of them. Then the snow grew softer and softer, and our moccasined feet were soon wet through. Large patches of the black shale with which much of this glacier is covered were quite bare of snow, and the sled had to be hauled laboriously across them. Then we began to encounter pools of water, which at first we avoided, but they soon grew so numerous that we went right through them.

[Sidenote: Flowers]

The going grew steadily wetter and rougher and more disagreeable. The lower stretch of a glacier is an unhandsome sight in summer: all sorts of rock debris and ugly black shale, with discolored melting ice and snow, intersected everywhere with streams of dirty water—this was what it had degenerated into as we reached the pass. The snow was entirely gone from the pass, so the sled was abandoned—left standing upright, with its gee-pole sticking in the air that if any one else ever chanced to want it it might readily be found. The snow-shoes were piled around it, and we resumed our packs and climbed up to the pass. The first thing that struck our eyes as we stood upon the rocks of the pass was a brilliant trailing purple moss flower of such gorgeous color that we all exclaimed at its beauty and wondered how it grew clinging to bare rock. It was the first bright color that we had seen for so long that it gave unqualified pleasure to us all and was a foretaste of the enhancing delights that awaited us as we descended to the bespangled valley. If a man would know to the utmost the charm of flowers, let him exile himself among the snows of a lofty mountain during fifty days of spring and come down into the first full flush of summer. We could scarcely pass a flower by, and presently had our hands full of blooms like schoolgirls on a picnic.

But although the first things that attracted our attention were the flowers, the next were the mosquitoes. They were waiting for us at the pass and they gave us their warmest welcome. The writer took sharp blame to himself that, organizing and equipping this expedition, he had made no provision against these intolerable pests. But we had so confidently expected to come out a month earlier, before the time of mosquitoes arrived, that although the matter was suggested and discussed it was put aside as unnecessary. Now there was the prospect of a fifty or sixty mile tramp across country, subject all the while to the assaults of venomous insects, which are a greater hindrance to summer travel in Alaska than any extremity of cold is to winter travel.

Not even the mosquitoes, however, took our minds from Johnny, and a load was lifted from every heart when we came near enough to our camp to see that some one was moving about it. A shout brought him running, and he never stopped until he had met us and had taken the pack from my shoulders and put it on his own. Our happiness was now unalloyed; the last anxiety was removed. The dogs gave us most jubilant welcome and were fat and well favored.

[Sidenote: Johnny and the Sugar]

What a change had come over the place! All the snow was gone from the hills; the stream that gathered its three forks at this point roared over its rocks; the stunted willows were in full leaf; the thick, soft moss of every dark shade of green and yellow and red made a foil for innumerable brilliant flowers. The fat, gray conies chirped at us from the rocks; the ground-squirrels, greatly multiplied since the wholesale destruction of foxes, kept the dogs unavailingly chasing hither and thither whenever they were loose. We never grew tired of walking up and down and to and fro about the camp—it was a delight to tread upon the moss-covered earth after so long treading upon nothing but ice and snow; it was a delight to gaze out through naked eyes after all those weeks in which we had not dared even for a few moments to lay aside the yellow glasses in the open air; it was a delight to see joyful, eager animal life around us after our sojourn in regions dead. Supper was a delight. Johnny had killed four mountain-sheep and a caribou while we were gone, and not only had fed the dogs well, but from time to time had put aside choice portions expecting our return. But what was most grateful to us and most extraordinary in him, the boy had saved, untouched, the small ration of sugar and milk left for his consumption, knowing that ours was all destroyed; and we enjoyed coffee with these luxurious appurtenances as only they can who have been long deprived of them. There are not many boys of fifteen or sixteen of any race who would voluntarily have done the like.



The next day there was much to do. There were pack-saddles of canvas to make for the dogs' backs that they might help us carry our necessary stuff out; our own clothing and footwear to overhaul, bread to bake, guns to clean and oil against rust. Yet withal, we took it lazily, with five to divide these tasks, and napped and lay around and continually consumed biscuits and coffee which Johnny continually cooked. We all took at least a partial bath in the creek, cold as it was, the first bath in—well, in a long time. Mountain climbers belong legitimately to the great unwashed.

It was a day of perfect rest and contentment with hearts full of gratitude. Not a single mishap had occurred to mar the complete success of our undertaking—not an injury of any sort to any one, nor an illness. All five of us were in perfect health. Surely we had reason to be grateful; and surely we were happy in having Him to whom our gratitude might be poured out. What a bald, incomplete, and disconcerting thing it must be to have no one to thank for crowning mercies like these!

On Tuesday, the 10th June, we made our final abandonment, leaving the tent standing with stove and food and many articles that we did not need cached in it, and with four of the dogs carrying packs and led with chains, packs on our own backs and the ice-axes for staves in our hands, we turned our backs upon the mountain and went down the valley toward the Clearwater. The going was not too bad until we had crossed that stream and climbed the hills to the rolling country between it and the McKinley Fork of the Kantishna. Again and again we looked back for a parting glimpse of the mountain, but we never saw sign of it any more. The foot-hills were clear, the rugged wall of the glacier cut the sky, but the great mountain might have been a thousand miles off for any visible indication it gave. It is easy to understand how travellers across equatorial Africa have passed near the base of the snowy peaks of Ruwenzori without knowing they were even in the neighborhood of great mountains, and have come back and denied their existence.

[Sidenote: Across Country]

The broken country between the streams was difficult. Underneath was a thick elastic moss in which the foot sank three or four inches at every step and that makes toilsome travelling. The mosquitoes were a constant annoyance. But the abundant bird life upon this open moorland, continually reminding one as it did of moorlands in the north of England or of Scotland, was full of interest. Ptarmigan, half changed from their snowy plumage to the brown of summer, and presenting a curious piebald appearance, were there in great numbers, cackling their guttural cry with its concluding notes closely resembling the "ko-ax, ko-ax" of the Frogs' Chorus in the comedy of Aristophanes; snipe whistled and curlews whirled all about us. Half-way across to the McKinley Fork it began to rain, thunder-peal succeeding thunder-peal, and each crash announcing a heavier downpour. Soon we were all wet through, and then the rain turned to hail that fell smartly until all the moss was white with it, and that gave place to torrents of rain again. Dog packs and men's packs were alike wet, and no one of us had a dry stitch on him when we reached the banks of the McKinley Fork and the old spacious hunting tent that stands there in which we were to spend the night. Rather hopelessly we hung our bedding to dry on ropes strung about some trees, and our wet clothing around the stove. By taking turns all the night in sitting up, to keep a fire going, we managed to get our clothes dried by morning, but the bedding was wet as ever. Fortunately, the night was a warm one.

[Sidenote: Glacial Streams]

The next morning there was the McKinley Fork to cross the first thing, and it was a difficult and disagreeable task. This stream, which drains the Muldrow Glacier and therefore the whole northeast face of Denali, occupies a dreary, desolate bed of boulder and gravel and mud a mile or more wide; rather it does not occupy it, save perhaps after tremendous rain following great heat, but wanders amid it, with a dozen channels of varying depth but uniform blackness, the inky solution of the shale which the mountain discharges so abundantly tingeing not only its waters but the whole Kantishna, into which it flows one hundred miles away. Commonly in the early morning the waters are low, the night frosts checking the melting of the glacier ice; but this morning the drainage of yesterday's rain-storm had swollen them. Channel after channel was waded in safety until the main stream was reached, and that swept by, thigh-deep, with a rushing black current that had a very evil look. Karstens was scouting ahead, feeling for the shallower places, stemming the hurrying waters till they swept up to his waist. The dogs did not like the look of it and with their packs, still wet from yesterday, were hampered in swimming. Two that Tatum was leading suddenly turned back when half-way across, and the chains, entangling his legs, pulled him over face foremost into the deepest of the water. His pack impeded his efforts to rise, and the water swept all over him. Karstens hurried back to his rescue, and he was extricated from his predicament, half drowned and his clothes filled with mud and sand. There was no real danger of drowning, but it was a particularly noxious ducking in icy filth. The sun was warm, however, and after basking upon the rocks awhile he was able to proceed, still wet, though he had stripped and wrung out his clothes—for we had no dry change—and very gritty in underwear, but taking no harm whatever. I think Tatum regretted losing, in the mad rush of black water, the ice-axe he had carried to the top of the mountain more than he regretted his wetting.

[Sidenote: Birds and Beasts]

On the further bank of the McKinley Fork we entered our first wood, a belt about three miles wide that lines the river. Our first forest trees gave us almost as much pleasure as our first flowers. Animal life abounded, all in the especially interesting condition of rearing half-grown young. Squirrels from their nests scolded at our intrusion most vehemently; an owl flew up with such a noisy snapping and chattering that our attention was drawn to the point from which she rose, and there, perched upon a couple of rotten stumps a few feet apart, were two half-fledged owlets, passive, immovable, which allowed themselves to be photographed and even handled without any indication of life except in their wondering eyes and the circumrotary heads that contained them. Moose signs and bear signs were everywhere; rabbits, now in their summer livery, flitted from bush to bush. That belt of wood was a zoological garden stocked with birds and mammals. And we rejoiced with them over their promising families and harmed none.

From the wood we rose again to the moorland—to the snipe and ptarmigan and curlews, some yet sitting upon belated eggs—to the heavy going of the moss and the yet heavier going of niggerhead. Our journey skirted a large lake picturesquely surrounded by hills, and we spoke of how pleasantly a summer lodge might be placed upon its shores were it not for the mosquitoes. The incessant leaping of fish, the occasional flight of fowl alone disturbed the perfect reflection of cliff and hill in its waters. At times we followed game trails along its margin; at times swampy ground made us seek the hillside.

Thus, slowly covering the miles that we had gone so quickly over upon the ice of the lake two months before, we reached Moose Creek and the miners' cabins at Eureka late at night and received warm welcome and most hospitable entertainment from Mr. Jack Hamilton. It was good to see men other than our own party again, good to sleep in a bed once more, good to regale ourselves with food long strange to our mouths. Here we had our first intimation of any happenings in the outside world for the past three months and sorrowed that Saint Sophia was still to remain a Mohammedan temple, and that the kindly King of Greece had been murdered. Here also Hamilton generously provided us with spare mosquito-netting for veils, and we found a package of canvas gloves I had ordered from Fairbanks long before, and so were protected from our chief enemies. From Moose Creek we went over the hills to Caribou Creek and again were most kindly welcomed and entertained by Mr. and Mrs. Quigley, and discussed our climb for a long while with McGonogill of the "pioneer" party. Then, mainly down the bed of Glacier Creek, now on lingering ice or snow-drift, with the water rushing underneath, now on the rocks, now through the brush, crossing and recrossing the creek, we reached the long line of desolate, decaying houses known as Glacier City, and found convenient refuge in one of the cabins therein, still maintained as an occasional abode. On the outskirts of the "city" next morning a moose and two calves sprang up from the brush, our approach over the moss not giving enough notice to awake her from sleep until we were almost upon her.



[Sidenote: The Boat]

Instead of pursuing our way across the increasingly difficult and swampy country to the place where our boat and supplies lay cached, we turned aside at midday to the "fish camp" on the Bearpaw, and, after enjoying the best our host possessed from the stream and from his early garden, borrowed his boat, choosing twenty miles or so on the water to nine of niggerhead and marsh. But the river was very low and we had much trouble getting the boat over riffles and bars, so that it was late at night when we reached that other habitation of dragons known as Diamond City. While we submerged our cached poling boat to swell its sun-dried seams, Walter and Johnny returned the borrowed boat, and, since the stream had fallen yet more, were many hours in reaching the fish camp and in tramping back.

[Sidenote: The Beaver and the Indians]

But the labor of the return journey was now done. A canvas stretched over willows made a shelter for the centre of the boat, and at noon on the second day men, dogs, and baggage were embarked, to float down the Bearpaw to the Kantishna, to the Tanana, to the Yukon. The Bearpaw swarmed with animal life. Geese and ducks, with their little terrified broods, scooted ahead of us on the water, the mothers presently leaving their young in a nook of the bank and making a flying detour to return to them. Sometimes a duck would simulate a broken wing to lure us away from the little ones. We had no meat and were hungry for the usual early summer diet of water-fowl, but not hungry enough to kill these birds. Beaver dropped noisily into the water from trees that exhibited their marvellous carpentry, some lying prostrate, some half chiselled through. It seemed, indeed, as though the beaver were preparing great irrigation works all through this country. Since the law went into effect prohibiting their capture until 1915 they have increased and multiplied all over interior Alaska. They are still caught by the natives, but since their skins cannot be sold the Indians are wearing beaver garments again to the great advantage of health in the severe winters. One wishes very heartily that the prohibition might be made perpetual, for only so will fur become the native wear again. It is good to see the children, particularly, in beaver coats and breeches instead of the wretched cotton that otherwise is almost their only garb. Would it be altogether beyond reason to hope that a measure which was enacted to prevent the extermination of an animal might be perpetuated on behalf of the survival of an interesting and deserving race of human beings now sorely threatened? Or is it solely the conservation of commercial resources that engages the attention of government? There are few measures that would redound more to the physical benefit of the Alaskan Indian than the perpetuating of the law against the sale of beaver skins. With the present high and continually appreciating price of skins, none of the common people of the land, white or native, can afford to wear furs. Such a prohibition as has been suggested would restore to Alaskans a small share in the resources of Alaska. Is there any country in the world where furs are actually needed more?

Not only beaver, but nearly all fur and game animals have greatly increased in the Kantishna country. In the year of the stampede, when thousands of men spent the winter here, there was wholesale destruction of game and trapping of fur. But the country, left to itself, is now restocked of game and fur, except of foxes, the high price of which has almost exterminated them here and is rapidly exterminating them throughout interior Alaska. They have been poisoned in the most reckless and unscrupulous way, and there seems no means of stopping it under the present law. We saw scarcely a fox track in the country, though a few years ago they were exceedingly plentiful all over the foot-hills of the great range. Mink, marten, and muskrat were seen from time to time swimming in the river; a couple of yearling moose started from the bank where they had been drinking as we noiselessly turned a bend; brilliant kingfishers flitted across the water. So down these rivers we drifted, sometimes in sunshine, sometimes in rain, until early in the morning of the 20th June, we reached Tanana, and our journey was concluded three months and four days after it was begun. When the telegraph office opened at 8 o'clock a message was sent, in accordance with promise, to a Seattle paper, and it illustrates the rapidity with which news is spread to-day that a ship in Bering Sea, approaching Nome, received the news from Seattle by wireless telegraph before 11 A. M. But a message from the Seattle paper received the same morning asking for "five hundred more words describing narrow escapes" was left unanswered, for, thank God, there were none to describe.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Ottawa: Thorburn & Abbott, 1913, p. 87.

[6] "Mt. McKinley Region": Alfred H. Brooks, Washington, 1911, p. 25.



CHAPTER VII

THE HEIGHT OF DENALI, WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE READINGS ON THE SUMMIT AND DURING THE ASCENT

The determination of the heights of mountains by triangulation is, of course, the method that in general commends itself to the topographer, though it may be questioned whether the very general use of aneroids for barometric determinations has not thrown this latter means of measuring altitudes into undeserved discredit when the mercurial barometer is used instead of its convenient but unreliable substitute.

The altitude given on the present maps for Denali is the mean of determinations made by triangulation by three different men: Muldrow on the Sushitna[7] side in 1898, Raeburn on the Kuskokwim side in 1902, and Porter, from the Yentna country in 1906. In addition, a determination was made by the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1910, from points near Cook's Inlet. "The work of the Coast Survey," writes Mr. Alfred Brooks, "is more refined than the rough triangulation done by our men; at the same time they were much further away." "It is a curious coincidence," he adds, "that the determination made by the Coast Survey was the mean which we had assumed from our three determinations" (twenty thousand three hundred feet).

[Sidenote: Theodolites and Barometers]

There are, however, two sources of error in the determination of the height of this mountain by triangulation—a general one and a particular one. The general one lies in the difficulty of ascertaining the proper correction to be applied for the refraction of the atmosphere, and the higher the mountain the greater the liability to this error; for not much is positively known about the angle of refraction of the upper regions of the air. The officers of the Trigonometrical Survey of India have published their opinion that the heights of the great peaks of the Himalayas will have to be revised on this account. The report of the Coast Survey's determination of the height of Denali claims a "co-efficient of refraction nearer the truth" than the figure used on a previous occasion; but a very slight difference in this factor will make a considerable difference in the result.

The particular source of error in the case of this mountain lies in the circumstance that its summit is flat, and there is no culminating point upon which the cross-hairs of the surveying instrument may intersect.

The barometric determination of heights is, of course, not without similar troubles of its own. The tables of altitudes corresponding to pressures do not agree, Airy's table giving relatively greater altitudes for very low pressures than the Smithsonian. All such tables as originally calculated are based upon the hypothesis of a temperature and humidity which decrease regularly with the altitude, and this is not always the case; nor is the "static equilibrium of the atmosphere" which Laplace assumed always maintained; that is to say an equal difference of pressure does not always correspond to an equal difference of altitude. There is, in point of fact, no absolute way to determine altitude save by running an actual line of levels; all other methods are approximations at best. But there had never been a barometric determination of the height of this mountain made, and it was resolved to attempt it on this expedition.

To this end careful arrangements were made and much labor and trouble undergone. The author carried his standard mercurial mountain barometer to Fort Gibbon on the Yukon in September, 1912, and compared it with the instrument belonging to the Signal Corps of the United States army at that post. A very close agreement was found in the two instruments; the reading of the one, by himself, and of the other, by the sergeant whose regular duty it was to read and record the instrument, being identical to two places of decimals at the same temperature.

[Sidenote: Readings on the Summit]

Arrangements were made with Captain Michel of the Signal Corps at Fort Gibbon, when the expedition started to the mountain in March, 1913, to read the barometer at that post three times a day and record the reading with the reading of the attached thermometer. Acknowledgment is here made of Captain Michel's courtesy and kindness in this essential co-operation. The reading at Fort Gibbon which most nearly synchronizes with the reading on top of the mountain is the one taken at noon on the 7th June. The reading on top of the mountain was made at about 1.50 P. M., so that there was an hour and fifty minutes difference in time. The weather, however, was set fair, without a cloud in the sky, and had been for more than twelve hours before and remained so for thirty-six hours afterward. It would seem, therefore, that the difference in time is negligible. The reading at Fort Gibbon, a place of an altitude of three hundred and thirty-four feet above sea-level, at noon on the 7th June, was 29.590 inches with an attached thermometer reading 76.5 deg. F. The reading on the summit of Denali, at 1.50 P. M. on the same day, was 13.617. The writer is greatly chagrined that he cannot give with the same confidence the reading of the attached thermometer on top of the mountain, but desires to set forth the circumstances and give the readings in his note-book records.

The note-book gives the air temperature on the summit as 7 deg. F., taken by a standard alcohol minimum thermometer, and it remained constant during the hour and a half we were there. The sun was shining, but a bitter north wind was blowing. But the reading of the thermometer attached to the barometer is recorded as 20 deg. F. I am unable to account for this discrepancy of 13 deg. The mercurial barometer was swung on its tripod inside the instrument tent we had carried to the summit, a rough zero was established, and it was left for twenty minutes or so to adjust itself to conditions before an exact reading was taken. It was my custom throughout the ascent to read and record the thermometer immediately after the barometer was read, but it is almost certain that on this momentous occasion it was not done. Possibly the thermometer was read immediately the instrument was taken out of its leather case and its wooden case and set up, while it yet retained some of the animal heat of the back that had borne it, and the reading was written in the prepared place. Then when the barometer was finally read, no temperature of the attached thermometer was noted. This is the only possible explanation that occurs, and it is very unsatisfactory. It was not until we were down at the base camp again that I looked at the figures, and discovered their difference, and I could not then recall in detail the precise operations on the summit. It is hard to understand, ordinarily, how any man could have recorded the two readings on the same page of the book without noticing their discrepancy, but perhaps the excitement and difficulty of the situation combined to produce what Sir Martin Conway calls "high altitude stupidity."

[Sidenote: In Exculpation]

It is indeed impossible to convey to the reader who has never found himself circumstanced as we were an understanding of our perturbation of mind and body upon reaching the summit of the mountain: breathless with excitement—and with the altitude—hearts afire and feet nigh frozen. What should be done on top, what first, what next, had been carefully planned and even rehearsed, but we were none of us schooled in stoical self-repression to command our emotions completely. Here was the crown of nearly three months' toil—and of all those long years of desire and expectation. It was hard to gather one's wits and resolutely address them to prearranged tasks; hard to secure a sufficient detachment of mind for careful and accurate observations. The sudden outspreading of the great mass of Denali's Wife immediately below us and in front of us was of itself a surprise that was dramatic and disconcerting; a splendid vision from which it was difficult to withdraw the eyes. We knew, of course, the companion peak was there, but had forgotten all about her, having had no slightest glimpse of her on the whole ascent until at the one stroke she stood completely revealed. Not more dazzling to the eyes of the pasha in the picture was the form of the lovely woman when the slave throws off the draperies that veiled her from head to foot. Moreover, problems that had been discussed and disputed, questions about the conformation of the mountain and the possibilities of approach to it, were now soluble at a glance and clamored for solution. We held them back and fell at once to our scientific work, denying any gratification of sight until these tasks were performed, yet it is plain that I at least was not proof against the disturbing consciousness of the wonders that waited.

It was bitterly cold, yet my fingers, though numb, were usable when I reached the top; it was in exposing them to manipulate the hypsometrical instruments that they lost all feeling and came nigh freezing. And breathlessness was naturally at its worst; I remember that even the exertion of rising from the prone position it was necessary to assume to read the barometer brought on a fit of panting.

[Sidenote: Calculations for Altitude]

With these circumstances in mind we will resume the discussion of the readings taken on the summit and their bearing upon the altitude of the mountain. It seems right to disregard the temperature recorded for the attached thermometer, and to use the air temperature, of which there is no doubt, in correcting the barometric reading. So they stand:

Bar. Temp. 13.617 inches 7 deg. F.

The boiling-point thermometer stood at 174.9 deg. F. when the steam was pouring out of the vent.

They stand therefore:

Gibbon (334 feet altitude) The Summit of Denali Bar. Ther. Bar. Ther. 29.590 76.5 deg. F. 13.617 7 deg. F.

Now, the tables accessible to the writer do not work out their calculations beyond eighteen thousand feet, and he confesses himself too long unused to mathematical labors of any kind for the task of extending them. He was, therefore, constrained to fall back upon the kindness of Mr. Alfred Brooks, the head of the Alaskan Division of the United States Geological Survey, and Mr. Brooks turned over the data to Mr. C. E. Giffin, topographic engineer of that service, to which gentleman thankful acknowledgment is made for the result that follows.

[Sidenote: Fort Gibbon and Valdez as Bases]

Ignoring a calculation based upon a temperature of 20 deg. F. on the summit, and another based upon a temperature of 13.5 deg. F. on the summit (the mean of the air temperature and that recorded for the attached thermometer) and confining attention to the calculation which takes the air temperature of 7 deg. F. as the proper figure for the correction of the barometer, a result is reached which shows the summit of Denali as twenty-one thousand and eight feet above the sea. It should be added that Mr. Giffin obtained from the United States Weather Bureau the barometric and thermometric readings taken at Valdez on 7th June about the same length of time after our reading on the summit as the reading at Gibbon was before ours. From these readings Mr. Giffin makes the altitude of the mountain twenty thousand three hundred and seventy-four feet above Valdez, which is ten feet above the sea-level. From this result Mr. Giffin is disposed to question the accuracy of the reading at Gibbon, though the author has no reason to doubt it was properly and carefully made. Valdez is much farther from the summit than Fort Gibbon and is in a different climatic zone. The calculation from the Valdez base should, however, be taken into consideration in making this barometric determination, and the mean of the two results, twenty thousand six hundred and ninety-six feet, or, roundly, twenty thousand seven hundred feet, is offered as the contribution of this expedition toward determining the true altitude of the mountain.