GLACIER PARK 51 



of the Overthrust is still visible to-day, a vast, broken, 

 pitted wall of petrified earth crust, strata after strata of 

 pink and gray and brown and green and white and red 

 stone laying their parallels one above the other up the 

 face of precipices, with the abrupt head wall of the 

 Continental Divide at the end of every erosion canon, 

 shooting straight up three or four thousand feet to the 

 castellated, knifeblade summit ridge where only the 

 goats and eagles dwell. 



Up one of these canons we turned at last, climbing to 

 a beautiful sheet of milky green water in an evergreen 

 frame, and bearing the silly name of Lake McDermott. 

 Here, on its shore, was a great hotel. Standing at our 

 window in this hotel, at sunset, we looked out across the 

 milky green lake and its dark fringes of firs to the 

 pyramid of Sharps Peak towering over us. Behind 

 that, to left and right, we saw the vast sawtooth cliffs 

 of the Divide, holding to the south the snows of Grin- 

 nell Glacier high on its shoulders and then leaping up to 

 the lofty rock ridgepole of Gould Mountain, feathery 

 white now with a fresh fall of snow, on the north 

 climbing to the blue-gray pyramid of Mount Wilbur 

 and then curving in a magnificent circle of castellated 

 ridges around the hole where Iceberg Lake lay hidden. 

 Over them all was a sweet sunset sky flecked with every 

 tint of mother-of-pearl. The green lake, the dark firs, 

 the stupendous nakedness of rock, and yet the sweet, 

 clear calmness of the whole composition, was such a 



