26 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



In a sheltered depression on the summit is a place which should 

 be historic. Here every band of pilgrims has camped for the night. 

 Here it has cast away its luggage, discarded its horses, abandoned its 

 dogs. Into the springy heather-grown basin, sheltered from the wind, 

 we may find trodden into the muck harnesses, sleds, bottles, cups, 

 plates, hats, trousers, neckties, bones of dogs, bones of horses, ravens, 

 newspapers, playing cards, cigarette papers, shirts, collars — every evi- 

 dence of a failing civilization. The dead ravens tell the story of their 

 premature attacks on clogs and horses, for the men have pistols, and 

 they are the last to go. Near this place, some later humorist has 

 built a house of empty beer bottles, set together with mortar — a house 

 big enough to shelter you and me from the storm. Bones of men are 

 strewn along the way — you can trace the trail by the soiled and dis- 

 located heather — but all these, so far as I know, have had a decent 

 burial. Some of them, to be sure, were buried under avalanches, but 

 that was on the south side of the pass, near the foot of the great un- 

 named waterfall, over which unheeded flows the Nameless Eiver. We. 

 have passed the waterfall and the river, and are now well down on the 

 Yukon side. The little ice-cold Summit Lake, where more than one 

 loaded team and its teamsters went through the breaking ice, is said to 

 be well stocked with trout. Men described these to us as Dolly A^arden 

 trout (Salvelinus malma). As the lake flows into the Yukon, and 

 as the Dolly Varden is not found in the Yukon, which has only the 

 Great Lake trout or Mackinaw trout (Cristivomer namaycush), we 

 developed a geological theory that the Yukon had stolen this lake 

 from the Skagway. The theory looked not unreasonable. Eivers do 

 such things. At the head of the lake was a little dam of glacial drift. 

 Cut through this dam, and the head of the Yukon would flow down 

 into the Skagway. Perhaps it did so in the days before this dam was 

 made. But facts are facts. Let us see what kind of trout lives in the 

 lake, and we will tell you its glacial history. My companion. Pro- 

 fessor Harold Heath, borrowed a fly and cast into the lake. We had 

 one rise, and landed the fish. It was the Great Lake trout and not 

 the Dolly Varden. So we laid our theory on the shelf and allowed the 

 Summit Lake to remain in the past as it is in the present, a head-spring 

 of the Yukon. I said that rivers do such things. At the head of the 

 Eoanoke Eiver, near Allegheny Springs, in Virginia, is a valley which 

 the Eoanoke has stolen — fishes and all — from the Holston Eiver, on 

 the other side of the ridge. To steal a valley is to undermine it grad- 

 ually from the other side, until the water in the first valley turns and 

 flows the other way. But the Yukon has stolen nothing; from the 

 Skagway, and on second thought it deserves no credit for its reticence. 

 It looks cold to the north of the White Pass, even in mid- 

 summer. Down the long rock-ridges between the lakes goes the trail 

 — on and on through reindeer moss and heather, all the wav above 



