Every One Of These Parks, Great And Small, Is
A Garden Filled Knee-Deep With Fresh, Lovely Flowers Of Every Hue, The
Most Luxuriant And The Most Extravagantly Beautiful Of All The Alpine
Gardens I Ever Beheld In All My Mountain-Top Wanderings.
We arrived at the Cloud Camp at noon, but no clouds were in sight,
save a few gauzy ornamental wreaths adrift in the sunshine.
Out of
the forest at last there stood the mountain, wholly unveiled, awful in
bulk and majesty, filling all the view like a separate, new-born
world, yet withal so fine and so beautiful it might well fire the
dullest observer to desperate enthusiasm. Long we gazed in silent
admiration, buried in tall daisies and anemones by the side of a
snowbank. Higher we could not go with the animals and find food for
them and wood for our own campfires, for just beyond this lies the
region of ice, with only here and there an open spot on the ridges in
the midst of the ice, with dwarf alpine plants, such as saxifrages and
drabas, which reach far up between the glaciers, and low mats of the
beautiful bryanthus, while back of us were the gardens and abundance
of everything that heart could wish. Here we lay all the afternoon,
considering the lilies and the lines of the mountains with reference
to a way to the summit.
At noon next day we left camp and began our long climb. We were in
light marching order, save one who pluckily determined to carry his
camera to the summit. At night, after a long easy climb over wide and
smooth fields of ice, we reached a narrow ridge, at an elevation of
about ten thousand feet above the sea, on the divide between the
glaciers of the Nisqually and the Cowlitz. Here we lay as best we
could, waiting for another day, without fire of course, as we were now
many miles beyond the timberline and without much to cover us. After
eating a little hardtack, each of us leveled a spot to lie on among
lava-blocks and cinders. The night was cold, and the wind coming down
upon us in stormy surges drove gritty ashes and fragments of pumice
about our ears while chilling to the bone. Very short and shallow was
our sleep that night; but day dawned at last, early rising was easy,
and there was nothing about breakfast to cause any delay. About four
o'clock we were off, and climbing began in earnest. We followed up
the ridge on which we had spent the night, now along its crest, now on
either side, or on the ice leaning against it, until we came to where
it becomes massive and precipitous. Then we were compelled to crawl
along a seam or narrow shelf, on its face, which we traced to its
termination in the base of the great ice cap. From this point all the
climbing was over ice, which was here desperately steep but
fortunately was at the same time carved into innumerable spikes and
pillars which afforded good footholds, and we crawled cautiously on,
warm with ambition and exercise.
At length, after gaining the upper extreme of our guiding ridge, we
found a good place to rest and prepare ourselves to scale the
dangerous upper curves of the dome. The surface almost everywhere was
bare, hard, snowless ice, extremely slippery; and, though smooth in
general, it was interrupted by a network of yawning crevasses,
outspread like lines of defense against any attempt to win the summit.
Here every one of the party took off his shoes and drove stout steel
caulks about half an inch long into them, having brought tools along
for the purpose, and not having made use of them until now so that the
points might not get dulled on the rocks ere the smooth, dangerous ice
was reached. Besides being well shod each carried an alpenstock, and
for special difficulties we had a hundred feet of rope and an axe,
Thus prepared, we stepped forth afresh, slowly groping our way through
tangled lines of crevasses, crossing on snow bridges here and there
after cautiously testing them, jumping at narrow places, or crawling
around the ends of the largest, bracing well at every point with our
alpenstocks and setting our spiked shoes squarely down on the
dangerous slopes. It was nerve-trying work, most of it, but we made
good speed nevertheless, and by noon all stood together on the utmost
summit, save one who, his strength failing for a time, came up later.
We remained on the summit nearly two hours, looking about us at the
vast maplike views, comprehending hundreds of miles of the Cascade
Range, with their black interminable forests and white volcanic cones
in glorious array reaching far into Oregon; the Sound region also, and
the great plains of eastern Washington, hazy and vague in the
distance. Clouds began to gather. Soon of all the land only the
summits of the mountains, St. Helen's, Adams, and Hood, were left in
sight, forming islands in the sky. We found two well-formed and well-preserved craters on the summit, lying close together like two plates
on a table with their rims touching. The highest point of the
mountain is located between the craters, where their edges come in
contact. Sulphurous fumes and steam issue from several vents, giving
out a sickening smell that can be detected at a considerable distance.
The unwasted condition of these craters, and, indeed, to a great
extent, of the entire mountain, would tend to show that Rainier is
still a comparatively young mountain. With the exception of the
projecting lips of the craters and the top of a subordinate summit a
short distance to the northward, the mountains is solidly capped with
ice all around; and it is this ice cap which forms the grand central
fountain whence all the twenty glaciers of Rainier flow, radiating in
every direction.
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