64 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



the name of perhaps the most beautiful rock pile on 

 the continent, the other of the most beautiful meadow, 

 the meadow where Pegasus must once have browsed 

 and the white feet of Aphrodite twinkled on the grass. 

 Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, by some happy miracle, 

 bears a name that is worthy of it. It rises abrupt and 

 sheer out of the green mirror of St. Mary Lake, five 

 thousand feet of naked wall from the lake shore, its sum- 

 mit almost ten thousand above sea level. It is devoid 

 of timber, even of visible vegetation, and loses its snow 

 early. In colour it is gray flushed with pink, and from 

 the lake shows as an almost perfect pyramid with the 

 apex removed making a level summit. Viewed, how- 

 ever, from up the canon, its shape is totally different. 

 Then its sides are far more precipitous, its summit 

 wider, and as the low afternoon sun strikes along its 

 great buttressed flank vast masses of lavender shadow 

 and thousand-foot high lights mould it into an archi- 

 tectural structure of ethereal solidity, a vast cathedral 

 of the primeval earth spirit. ' Some day its name will 

 be famous among mountains. 



Piegan Meadow ! All the morning we had plodded up 

 the long trail over Piegan Pass, at first directly under 

 and then across the canon from the absolutely precipi- 

 tous wall of Gould Mountain where a silver waterfall was 

 descending for three thousand feet, like the hair of 

 Melisande, its soft thunder windborne to our ears. We 

 crossed the summit in deep snow, amid a jumble of naked 



