June i, 1507.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
849 
TELE-PHOTO VIEW OF MOUNT BAKER, DISTANT TEN MILES. 
The last view from the forest trail. The snow 
» Nooksack, in a region where everything else for 
miles around stands on end. A more beautiful 
[' spot for a camping place could not have been 
planned by all the arts of man. Nature outdid 
herself in providing the spot with about every 
beauty and convenience that heart could wish. 
A group of four lakes, known to prospectors 
as Galena Lakes, two forming the source of the 
one stream and two the source of the other, lay 
at our feet like mirrors reflecting the blue of 
the sky, the red and gray rocks, the white banks 
It of snow, the greensward, and the hoary hemlocks, 
shaggy with long festoons of pale-green moss, 
protected from winds by wooded hills, jagged 
• mountain peaks and great vertical cliffs near a 
thousand feet high. Icebergs were floating in 
one lake, and another was tempered by sun and 
rocks just right for plunge bathing, a use to 
which it was daily put. Low, rounded ridges 
divide the lakes, and clumps of shade trees and 
grassy lawn greeted us here and there. There 
were ice cold springs of the purest water, clear 
as crystal, on every hand. Streams there were, 
whose presence could only be known by a muffled 
gurgle of running water under the surface and 
rivulets, playing peek-a-boo by rising and sink¬ 
ing among the rocks. In places were open parks 
sloping gently to the shores; in others rock 
i slides from towering cliffs, slanting steep down 
into the waters to unknown depths. 
Bridal Veil Falls came tumbling out of the sky 
as it were, dropping over sheer precipices many 
hundreds of feet high. Within a few feet of the 
most charming spot of all, the place where our 
tents were pitched and where we lounged in the 
shade or walked upon the green, the outlet of a 
j lake plunged into a gorge and day and night 
kept splashing and dashing “like the waters come 
down at Ladore.” 
The parks were gay with white azaleas, pink 
j spirea, and marguerites, white, lavender and 
purple The tall white valerian, the blue lupine, 
the red monkey flowers, and well nigh a hundred 
other varieties of flowers added their beauty 
and their fragrance to enhance this elysian camp 
ground of the Mazamas. 
The color scheme was enchanting enough to 
drive an artist wild. The sharp shadows at any 
angle of light, the gradations of shading from 
1 the most sombre to high lights, the thin haze of 
distance beyond the treetops and ridges interven¬ 
ing between them and grander and more impos¬ 
ing objects beyond, together with newness and 
1 variety, combined to produce scenes most be- 
! witching to behold. 
j Situated at cloud line at times the mists would 
form and circle about one, * appearing and dis- 
1 appearing like spectres, again reforming like curl¬ 
ing steam on the surface of a lake, transforming 
it in appearance into a seething cauldron. Clumps 
of trees would vanish and great walls of rock 
dissolve into nothingness, while overhead the 
blue and the gray would alternate while the sun¬ 
shine tauntingly spread its shadows on the ground 
before us like robes strewn in the pathway of 
victors. These lines of Addison seem to have a 
special adaptation to this fascinating place: 
“How has kind heaven adorned the happy land, 
And scattered blessings with a lavish hand.” 
Near by is a huge tableland, with Iceberg Lake 
I cuddling in the shade of its perpendicular walls, 
a flat top dome, or nearly so, circular in contour, 
i about a mile in diameter, covered with a glacier 
| elevated 800 feet above the immediate surround- 
) mgs. It is situated about midway between Mount 
Baker and Mount Shuksan on a high ridge con¬ 
necting the two mountains along the water shed 
of the Skagit and Nooksack rivers. Its eleva¬ 
tion above sea level is approximately 6,000 feet, 
while that of Shuksan is 9.000 and Baker almost 
11,000, the highest point along the ridge being 
Coleman Peak to the westward toward Baker, 
and the lowest Austin Pass in the opposite direc¬ 
tion. 
From reliable information obtained from miners 
and prospectors who have explored the country 
quite thoroughly around Mount Shuksan, in their 
search for gold, and from the reports of Curtiss 
and Price, two of the Mazama party who made 
the first ascent of it ever made, it is evident 
that this mountain pile is composed of sedimen¬ 
tary formation more or less metamorphosed and 
is not properly of volcanic origin like Mount 
Baker. This would indicate that the age of 
Shuksan is identical with that of the Cascade 
range, a period in the history of mountain mak¬ 
ing when the sedimentary deposits were broken 
up into great cakes and tilted about and elevated 
by that stunt in terrestrial dynamics which pro¬ 
duced mountains without great heat, while the 
age of Baker is comparatively recent, as every 
evidence so far goes to prove, and its origin, 
being surely volcanic, was accompanied by ex¬ 
cessive heat. 
Sequences are all that can be considered in 
this descriptive narrative, however interesting 
the recital of causes might happen to be. Mount 
Baker as we find it is an eruption of igneous 
or fire rocks, pushed upward through the already 
rough and broken mountainous surface, protrud¬ 
ing through the extensive rifts and fissures in 
the sedimentary crusts and covering an area of 
route, official climb, indicated by dotted lines. 
approximately two hundred square miles of terri¬ 
tory. 
The different varieties of this intrusion of 
igneous rocks, from pumice stone so light that 
it w'ill float on water, found in place near the 
summit; lava, porous like sponge, next below 
succeeding; trachyte, molten at one time like 
the lava, but lacking the porosity, forming the 
middle region of the cone; other basaltic rocks 
still lower down, beautifully colored in places, 
crystallized while cooling from a semi-liquid state 
into hexagonal columns like the renowned Giants’ 
Causeway, and symmetrical blocks piled high like 
ricks of cordwood and like walls of masonry; to, 
lowest dowm and adjoining the broken edges of 
the sedimentary rocks, fields and ridges of por¬ 
phyry. never completely fused, but plastic—all 
are of the same general composition, varying 
mainly as to the degree of heat to which these 
fire rocks were exposed. 
The building of the mountain was probably 
rapid and quickly over; that is, comparatively 
rapid geologically speaking. These conclusions 
have been reached for the reasons, among others, 
that there were never any extensive overflows 
of lava at the time nor since, and that the radia¬ 
tion of heat into the adjoining cold rocks meta¬ 
morphosed only to limited distances some of the 
more fusible, and blistered and shattered others 
into fragments, among which the wax-like por¬ 
phyry was compressed and cooling formed a 
breccia or conglomerate. The most striking 
example imaginable of this is the conglomerate 
along the contact with the bodies of slate, be¬ 
ginning at Iceberg Lake, which is the limit of 
volcanic area toward the northwest from Mount 
Baker. The first fragments of slate are myriads 
