242 



Sierra Club Bulletin 



The next morning we started on a one-night knapsack trip 

 to Lake Maye. We forded the river and set off through the 

 "muskeg" of the canon bottom — a thick turf of wiry grass 

 undermined by swampy bogs wherein the unwary traveler 

 plunges to the knee. After fighting our way through this 

 and up a steep slope of tangled forest, we emerged on the more 

 open brow of a cliff. Below us a stream rioted in sparkling 

 cascades, and on the opposite wall of Horsethief Canon another 

 cascade poured down from a high-hung glacier. Later we 

 turned up a small side stream. Bright mosses, in which we 

 sank ankle-deep, grew close to its bed, and even at times so 

 encroached upon it that the stream undercut them and flowed 

 by unseen. Soon we reached an upland park country, adorned 

 by patches of parnassia and delicate cassiope bells. Fir and 

 spruce gave way in turn to the Lyall larch, a picturesque species 

 which here forms the bulk of the timberline forest. 



At last the lake lay before us, a lovely sheet of robin's-egg 

 blue, about two miles long and perhaps a mile wide. Across its 

 whole upper end stretches the great front wall of a glacier 

 which breaks off into it in ice cliffs from fifty to seventy-five 

 feet high. On the dark mountain walls hang nine smaller 

 glaciers. Some of them deeply overlay the summit rocks and 

 form smooth white cornices that break in sharp blue cleavage 

 lines above the cliffs; others flow down the gorges and de- 

 clivities of the mountain-sides in magnificent ice cascades; 

 still others hang on the steep walls with precipices above and 

 below. Avalanche voices are never long silent, for from all 

 of the glaciers masses of ice are constantly falling, to be 

 gathered together and welded into the great piedmont glacier 

 that flows with such fine, broad, sweeping lines into the lake, its 

 late bed. 



We dropped our knapsacks near the outlet, crossed it, and 

 made our way along the easterly shore over talus piles, com- 

 posed partly of granite, partly of slate and shale. We reached 

 the front of the glacier and walked out on its deeply fissured 

 surface, anxious to follow it high enough to get a view around 

 the bend into its upper basin. But sunset was drawing too near 

 for us to venture far among its crevasses, and reluctantly we 

 turned back. 



