10 OUE NATIONAL PAEKS. 



This range was once a famous hunting ground for large game. 

 Lord Dunraven, the famous English sportsman, visited it yearly to 

 shoot its deer, bear, and bighorn sheep, and once he tried to buy it 

 for a private game preserve. Now that the Government has made 

 it a national park the protection offered its wild animals will make 

 it, in a few years, one of the most successful wild-animal refuges in 

 the world. 



These lofty rocks are the natural home of the celebrated Rocky 

 Mountain sheep, or bighorn. This animal is much larger than any 

 domestic sheep. It is powerful and wonderfully agile. When flying 

 from enemies, these sheep, even the lambs, think nothing of dropping 

 head downward off precipices hundreds of feet high. They do not 

 land on their curved horns, as many persons believe, but upon their 

 four feet held close together. Striking some ledge which breaks their 

 fall, they immediately plunge again downward to another ledge, and 

 so on till they reach good footing in the valley below. They also 

 ascend slopes surprisingly steep. 



They are more agile even than the celebrated chamois of the 

 Swiss Alps, and are larger, more powerful, and much handsomer. 

 It is something not to be forgotten to see a flock of a dozen or twenty 

 mountain sheep making their way along the blown-out volcanic crater 

 of Specimen Mountain in the Rocky Mountain National Park. 



LONGS PEAK AND THE GLACIER RECORDS 



The prominent central feature of the Rocky Mountain National 

 Park is Longs Peak. It rears a square-cornered boxlike head well 

 above the tumbled sea of surrounding mountain tops. It has, unlike 

 most great mountains, a distinct architectural form. Standing well 

 to the east of the range at about its center, it suggests the captain of 

 a white-helmeted company, the giant leader of a giant band. It is 

 supported on four sides by mountain buttresses, suggesting the stone 

 buttresses of a central cathedral spire. From every side it looks the 

 same, yet remarkably different. One does not know Longs Peak 

 until he has seen it from every side, and then it becomes to him not 

 a mountain mass but an architectural creation. 



For many years Longs Peak was considered unclimbable. But at 

 last a way was found through an opening in perpendicular rocks 

 called, from its shape, the Keyhole, out upon a steep slope leading 

 from near its summit far down to a precipice upon its west side. 

 The east side of Longs Peak is a nearly sheer precipice almost 2,000 

 feet from the extreme top down to Chasm Lake, which was the start- 

 ing point of a gigantic glacier in times long before man. Chasm 

 Lake, which is not difficult to reach from the valley, is one of the 

 wildest lakes in nature. It is frozen eleven months of the year. 



There is no other region in America where glacial records of such 

 prominence are so numerous and so easily reached and studied as in 



