( 16 ) 
But though we may not count the centuries of the forest’s 
existence, we can read something of the geological record of 
the time before it. The rocks of the Puget Sound basin are 
buried under an enormous deposit of gravel, at least three 
or four hundred feet deep, the grist ground out by glaciers 
much more extensive than those now found on Mt. Tacoma. 
About 1600 feet above the present sea level, these boulders 
form ocean terraces, the limits of the submergence that fol¬ 
lowed the cold period ; and the canons and river valleys cut 
since the gravels were deposited, tell of long and rapid erosion, 
before the forests sprang up ; for, despite the great rainfall, the pres¬ 
ent erosion of the Sound basin is very slow on account of the pro¬ 
tection afforded by the forests. This forest extends from southern 
Oregon northward to Alaska along the western slope of the Cas¬ 
cade range. It does not pass over the summit eastward and it is 
very different from the open park-like forests of California. 
Between the southern end of the Sound and Mt. Tacoma the timber 
belt is about 45 miles wide. 
Several parties have, in the last fifteen years, followed up the Nis- 
qually and Cowlitz Rivers to Mt. Tacoma, approaching it from the 
southwest, and they have left some record of their trips. Hazard 
Stephens, the son of Gov. I. I. Stephens, ascended the mountain 
in August, 1870, and spent the night in the crater ; and, in Octo¬ 
ber of the same year, A. D. Wilson and S. F. Emmons, of the 
U. S. Geological Survey, spent three weeks on the south and 
east, and also gained the summit. Stephens’s account of his 
trip was published in the November Atlantic for 1876. His 
description of the night spent in the crater, warming one side 
by the jets of steam that issue from the crevices, while the 
other side was freezing in the icy blast, hardly tempts one to try 
the experiment. Yet his two companions repeated it last sum¬ 
mer with Mr. George Bayley of San Francisco. There is no 
published account of Mr. Wilson’s trip. 
On the north and northwest, Mt. Tacoma is drained by three 
rivers, White River, Carbon River and the Puyallup. In 1833 
Dr. Tolmie, superintendent of the Hudson Bay Company’s trad¬ 
ing posts on the Sound, made his way up the “ Puyallipa,” prob¬ 
ably the present Carbon River, and ascended a peak on the north¬ 
west ‘flank of Mt. Tacoma. This was the first approach of a 
