150 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON 



fires were still smouldering. Hood is a burned-out 

 volcano, as is every cone in the Cascade Range, 

 whose fires were blazing throughout the middle 

 epochs of the Tertiary Period, whose lava-flows 

 now spread as sage plains all over eastern Oregon 

 where the stratified ash and tuff lie three to four 

 thousand feet deep. The Oligocene epochs of 

 those flaming fires passed into the Miocene, the 

 Miocene into the Pliocene, when the Tertiary 

 Period gave place to the Quaternary with its 

 Pleistocene epoch of Glacial and Interglacial 

 stages, which, in turn, passed into our present 

 epoch; and still the walls of Hood retain their 

 heat; and still the vapors rise and pour through 

 the rifted rim of the crater down over those glacial 

 snows that lie unmelted on the summit. 



The topmost point of Hood is a jagged piece 

 of yellow igneous rock or slag, soft, sulphurous, 

 with the smell of the volcanic fires still strong 

 upon it. Originally a part of the crater wall, it is 

 now but a weathered fragment poised on a pin- 

 nacle left by the caving of the rest of the rim into 

 the cavity of the crater. The summit is thus a 

 point, an apex, one of the few high peaks of the 

 world upon which you can stand, and, without 



