812 Camps and Tramps About Ktaadn. 



ous by a low growth of shrubs which quite concealed it. Getting 

 over these places brought a stress upon the temper as well as upon 

 muscle and nerve. The remainder of the way to the Basin was 

 chiefly a line of spotted trees, which gradually led up the lower flanks 

 of the mountain, but wound in detail over steep pitches and through 

 tangled thickets. There were occasional " wind-falls," which were 

 difficult to penetrate or to get around, and where the blazed line was 

 easily lost; and there were rocky stream-beds to be climbed on all 

 fours. A point two miles from the Basin reveals a magnificent view, 

 both of the mountain and of Ktaadn Lake and its surrounding hills. 

 Much of the forest has been harmed by neither fire nor axe, and is 

 full of beautiful pictures. 



The body of Ktaadn extends, in bulk, some ten miles to the north 

 of the pyramid. Its east side is gouged out in two enormous chasms 

 — the Great Basin and the North Basin, the depth of which does not 

 appear to the beholder from Ktaadn Lake. The Great Basin is 

 a horse-shoe shaped gorge, some three miles in longest diameter 

 and above a mile deep. Its floor is a plateau, a thousand feet above 

 the general plain, embracing a forest and a little lake. The less 

 precipitous northern lobe is divided from the southern by a "horse- 

 back." The southern lobe of the Great Basin, not visible from 

 Ktaadn Lake, is an amphitheater a mile in diameter. Its formation 

 is not only magnificent, but surprising, in that it occupies the whole 

 interior of the pyramid. The huge head of Ktaadn is hollow, but 

 its hollowness only adds to its pictorial effect. It is the twofold 

 wonder of our eastern scenery, — our grandest mountain inclosing our 

 grandest gorge, — and so associating in one harmonious whole the 

 effects of Sierra peaks with those of Colorado canons. 



At the foot of our camp is the little Basin Lake, a thousand feet 

 long and half that width, — cold, clear, and azoic as the granite cliffs 

 that rise out of its shore. Around it lie drift bowlders of every age, 

 and huge rocks, split from the mountain, like monolithic houses 

 tumbled together by an earthquake. Over the smaller debris many- 

 colored foliage creeps up into the rifts, and towering above and 

 beyond is the ragged granite precipice half a mile in sheer altitude. 

 On such a grand scale is everything here that distances are decep- 

 tive. What was apparently a mere belt of trees on the opposite 

 shore is a forest more than half a mile deep, through which we 

 followed up a picturesque stream-bed to the foot of the cliffs. 



