The untrodden Field of Alaska. 179 



raphers should first consider tlie unknown and unexplored 

 regions on their own continent; that American mountaineers 

 should climb American mountains, and American geologists 

 seek American glaciers and American volcanoes. 



The ascent of mount Rainier, that isolated peak which holds a 

 small Switzerland on its sides and promises reason for another 

 Zermatt to grow up on its slope, has been made by only thirty- 

 eight people, while the records of Alpine clubs tell what American 

 climbers can do on other 14,000-foot summits in other countries. 

 All the northwestern coast from mount Rainier to mount Saint 

 Elias and down the recurved shore to Unalaska offer such a field 

 for the explorer, the mountaineer, the geologist, and geographer 

 as exists nowhere else on any continent. Only one of the eight 

 great glaciers in Glacier ba}^ has been explored, mapped, and 

 measured, and not one of the trinity of great peaks that guard 

 the bay have been trodden by white men, if ever by a human 

 foot. The exquisite Taku glacier, only eighteen, miles by water 

 from the largest town in Alaska, is unexplored, unmapped, un- 

 measured, and the world knows only the facts apparent from 

 its beautifully sculptured front. The great glaciers in Prince 

 William sound, the grandest and gloomiest fiord on any coast 

 within the temperate zone, are unnamed, unvisited, unsung. No 

 more is known of them really than in Vancouver's day, and in 

 that great landscape reserve of Cook inlet the living volcano 

 of Iliamna has been climbed but once since the transfer. No 

 one has ever attemjjted the greater volcano of Shishaldin, 

 sloping steeply from the sea at the head of the Aleutian chain, 

 the most exquisite uplift of earth even upon all that coast, a 

 mountain with a more purely perfect outline than the Japanese 

 Fujiyama. 



