MOUNT RAINIER 



human foot could have followed out the course we came, 

 as we looked back upon it. 



After a few hours more of this climbing, we stood 

 upon the summit of the last mountain-ridge that sepa- 

 rated us from Takhoma. We were in a saddle of the 

 ridge ; a lofty peak rose on either side. Below us ex- 

 tended a long, steep hollow or gulch rilled with snow, 

 the farther extremity of which seemed to drop off 

 perpendicularly into a deep valley or basin. Across 

 this valley, directly in front, filling up the whole horizon 

 and view with an indescribable aspect of magnitude 

 and grandeur, stood the old leviathan of mountains. 

 The broad, snowy dome rose far among and above the 

 clouds. The sides fell off in vertical steeps and fearful 

 black walls of rock for a third of its altitude ; lower 

 down, vast, broad, gently sloping snow-fields sur- 

 rounded the mountain, and were broken here and there 

 by ledges or masses of the dark basaltic rock protrud- 

 ing above them. Long, green ridges projected from 

 this snow-belt at intervals, radiating from the moun- 

 tain and extending many miles until lost in the distant 

 forests. Deep valleys lay between these ridges. Each 

 at its upper end formed the bed of a glacier, which 

 closed and filled it up with solid ice. Below the snow- 

 line bright green grass with countless flowers, whose 

 vivid scarlet, blue, and purple formed bodies of color 

 in the distance, clothed the whole region of ridges and 

 valleys, for a breadth of five miles. The beautiful 

 balsam firs, about thirty feet in height, and of a purple, 

 dark-green color, stood scattered over the landscape, 

 now singly, now in groves, and now in long lines, as 

 though planted in some well-kept park. Farther down 

 an unbroken fir forest surrounded the mountain and 

 clad the lower portions of the ridges and valleys. In 

 every sheltered depression or hollow lay beds of snow 

 with tiny brooks and rivulets flowing from them. The 

 glaciers terminated not gradually, but abruptly, with a 

 wall of ice from one to five hundred feet high, from be- 



