GLACIER PARK 65 



shale heaps like a Dore dream. We descended, long 

 past the noon hour, under a hot sun, by a trail which 

 was dug into a shale slide a half hour to reach the 

 little figures which we saw plodding up, even their 

 faces distinct a mile away, another half hour to reach 

 the bottom of the shale, where the limber pines began 

 and the smell of ice- water rills was good in the horses' 

 nostrils. We swung at a trot around the base of a 

 precipice and the meadow lay before us. 



It was, perhaps, a mile wide, a deep cup between 

 beetling cliffs which held glaciers in their upper pockets. 

 On the southerly edge it dropped off into space. It was 

 carpeted with lush, emerald grass, plentifully studded 

 with gnarled, Japanese-like limber pines gay with red 

 cone buds, sprinkled everywhere with nodding, golden, 

 dog-tooth violets, and criss-crossed with tiny rills of 

 ice water from the patches of white snow, rills which 

 sparkled and flashed silver in the sun. But that was 

 not all. Looking out over the green and gold carpet, 

 beneath the frame of some twisted pine branch, you 

 gazed across the hole where the meadow disappeared in 

 space, and ten miles away, at the end of the vista, rose 

 serenely the ten thousand feet of Mount Jackson, a 

 pyramid of white and blue, with the great snow mantle 

 of Blackfeet Glacier glistening on its shoulder. Piegan 

 Meadow! It has no rival in mountain loveliness. The 

 hour was perilously late when we poured the nectar from 

 one of the ice- water rills on our campfire and heard the 



