WHERE GLACIERS FEED THE APPLE ROOTS 75 



depth of a lake, as a rule, adds little to pictorial im- 

 pressiveness. But the case is otherwise here. Lake 

 Chelan is sixteen hundred feet deep, which means that 

 its bottom is six hundred feet below sea level. As you 

 look upon the abrupt plunge of the mountain walls into 

 its green depths and realize that they continue their 

 descent below the surface for more than a thousand feet, 

 the imagination is staggered with the slit in the earth 

 crust this Chelan canon must have been before it was 

 partially filled with water. For nearly forty miles it 

 was once from one to almost three thousand feet deeper 

 than the Grand Canon of the Colorado and still is, 

 could we see to the bottom of this green mid-surface on 

 which we float. At any point of the shore the Maure- 

 tania could throw a gang plank to the cliffs and never 

 graze her keel. Putting in close, our launch took us 

 under the spray of waterfalls and beneath hanging rock 

 gardens of lupine and paint brush, foxglove and goat's 

 beard, while on many a craggy headland some storm- 

 scarred fir flung long branches southward in the lee of 

 the twisted trunk, its northward limbs shaved off by 

 wind and sleet. 



But the full glory of Chelan lies not in its depths of 

 green water, nor in its upleaping banks which slope back 

 a thousand feet above water level and carry mantles of 

 fir up to the seven-thousand-foot timber line. Its full 

 glory is the revelation of the main Cascade Range at 

 the head of the vista, a procession of pyramidal peaks 



