and a half, comes out on a jutting cliff from which you may drop 
a stone 1500 feet into the brawling river below. It is a fearful 
height to look from, and I do not wonder that a gentleman from 
Illinois who had never been on a mountain before, turned away 
faint and sat down behind a tree, with his back to the view, to 
recover himself. To your right, across the canon as you look up 
it, arc black precipices and snow fields ; to your left, the crags rise 
higher and higher behind the trees, and before you, a short mile 
distant, the north glacier of the Puyallup caps the cliffs at the end 
of the gorge. Its brown face is seamed with muddy rivulets and 
split by innumerable crevasses. It is about a thousand feet across 
and a hundred feet thick where the ice masses totter on the edge. 
Now and again they fall, shattering into a thousand pieces on the 
boulders of the terminal moraine. Back from its end the glacier 
slopes gently upward for half a mile, then rises abruptly 5000 feet 
in two miles and a half to its head, under vonder walls of rock and 
•/ 
snow that support the gleaming Liberty Cap. There are cer¬ 
tainly eight glaciers on Mt. Tacoma, pefhaps ten or twelve ; I do 
not know exactly how many there may be 'on the southeast; but, 
beginning on the northeast and counting westward, there are the 
glaciers of the White and Carbon Rivers, the two of the north 
fork of the Puyallup, the one of the south fork, that of the Nis- 
qually and probably two of the Cowlitz River. If we would trace 
the formation of these glaciers we must go back to the snow flakes 
that fall on the triple summit of Mt. Tacoma from October to June. 
They fill every cranny of the rocks and round up every wrinkle 
in the weather beaten mountain, packing down closely to the shin¬ 
ing snow mantle, that thickens with each winter’s storms and 
lessens under the summer’s suns; it will be interesting to note, 
» 
when the opportunities for observation permit, whether the ulti¬ 
mate result is an increase or decrease of this great neve. As the 
seasons pass, there is a steady downward movement of the com¬ 
pacted masses, and avalanche follows avalanche in those tremen¬ 
dous leaps of 1000 feet to 4000 feet from the cliffs that gird the 
mountain. After lingering for months on its shoulders, the snowy 
particles dash down with a roar, whirling in the wild eddies of 
their own fall, plunging down, down on the glaciers below. It 
is but an instant of intense energy, the transition from months of 
quiet in the great snow cap to years of resistless march in the ice 
