MOUNT RAINIER 



In honor of our guide we named the cascade at our 

 feet Sluiskin's Falls ; the stream we named Glacier 

 Creek, and the mass of ice whence it derives its source 

 we styled the Little Nisqually Glacier. 



Before daylight the next morning, Wednesday, 

 August 17, 1870, we were up and had breakfasted, 

 and at six o'clock we started to ascend Takhoma. Be- 

 sides our Alpine staffs and creepers, we carried a long 

 rope, and ice-axe, a brass plate inscribed with our 

 names, our flags, a large canteen, and some luncheon. 

 We were also provided with gloves, and green goggles 

 for snow-blindness, but found no occasion to use the 

 latter. Having suffered much from the heat of the 

 sun since leaving Bear Prairie, and being satisfied from 

 our late reconnoissance that we could reach the sum- 

 mit and return on the same day, we left behind our 

 coats and blankets. In three hours of fast walking 

 we reached the highest point of the preceding day's 

 trip, and commenced the ascent by the steep, rocky 

 ridge already described as reaching up to the snowy 

 dome. We found it to be a very narrow, steep, irregu- 

 lar backbone, being solid rock, while the sides were 

 composed of loose broken rocks and debris. Up this 

 ridge, keeping upon the spine when possible, and some- 

 times forced to pick our way over the loose and broken 

 rocks at the sides, around columnar masses which we 

 could not directly climb over, we toiled for five hundred 

 yards, ascending at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees. 

 Here the ridge connected, by a narrow neck or saddle, 

 with a vast square rock, whose huge and distinct out- 

 line can be clearly perceived from a distance of twenty- 

 five miles. This, like the ridge, is a conglomerate of 

 basalt and trap, in well-defined strata, and is rapidly 

 disintegrating and continually falling in showers and 

 even masses of rocks and rubbish, under the action of 

 frost by night and melting snow by day. It lies im- 

 bedded in the side of the mountain, with one side and 

 end projected and overhanging deep, terrible gorges, 



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