174 



Sierra Club Bulletin. 



However, there was still a long snow-field to be 

 traversed, still another rocky promontory to be climbed, 

 and it was close upon five o'clock before we reached the 

 foot of the final steep ice slope that guards the summit. 

 Here it was necessary to cut steps and to use the rope, 

 and although the difficult place was short, probably not 

 more than two or three hundred feet, our progress had 

 to be slow. At last we reached the top of the ice, climbed 

 a little rocky eminence, and emerged upon the broad 

 snow-field that crowns St. Helens. The true summit lies 

 at the southwestern extremity of this field, so we crossed 

 it and at 7:15 attained the highest point. 



To-day, as we who stood there recall the scene, memory 

 assures us that it was one of the most impressive and 

 beautiful that our eyes had ever met. For hundreds of 

 miles the forest country lay stretched at our feet, dark 

 •and shadowy and half veiled in mist. Westward the 

 great red sun, vanishing in a rosy glow of fog, seemed 

 also at our feet, so far were we set above the sea and its 

 dim horizon line. The sky was bright with rose and 

 yellow and palest green. North, east, and south of us 

 the three great snow cones — Rainier, Adams, and Hood 

 — were so aglow with sunset light that it seemed as if 

 lingering flames must still burn on these altars of ancient 

 fires. Before their glory was gone night had closed in 

 upon the lowlands. The winds of the daytime were 

 stilled and the silence of the high places was upon us. 

 The lowland nights are full of sound, a thousand wee 

 rustlings and whisperings and flittings of unseen winged 

 creatures, the stir of leaf, the tinkling drop of water; 

 but in the white lands when night comes all is silence, 

 a silence significant not of death, but rather of the unborn 

 ages yet to come. 



All this we can remember now, but at the moment the 

 wonder of it was almost lost in the sense of loneliness, 

 of vastness, of piercing cold. That enormous bulk of ice, 

 snow, and treacherous rock separating us from fire, water, 

 food, and the haunts of man was all that our minds could 



