ises 13,269 feet, the cleft between their summits being
the way of the trail to Longs Peak summit. Merging with it in mass upon
the south, Mount Meeker rises 13,911 feet. Once the three were one
monster mountain. Frosts and rains carried off the crust strata, bared
the granite core, and chipped it into three summits, while a glacier of
large size gouged out of its middle the abyss which divides the
mountains, and carved the precipice, which drops twenty-four hundred
feet from Longs Peak summit to Chasm Lake. The Chasm, which is easily
reached by trail from the hotels at the mountain's foot, is one of the
wildest places in America. It may be explored in a day.

Mountain climbing is becoming the fashion in Rocky Mountain National
Park among those who never climbed before, and it will not be many years
before its inmost recesses are penetrated by innumerable trampers and
campers. The "stunt" of the park is the ascent of Longs Peak. This is no
particular matter for the experienced, for the trail is well worn, and
the ascent may be made on horseback to the boulder field, less than two
thousand feet from the summit; but to the inexperienced it appears an
undertaking of first magnitude. From the boulder field the trail carries
out upon a long sharp slant which drops into the precipice of Glacier
Gorge, and ascends the box-like summit cap by a shelf trail which
sometimes has terrors for the unaccustomed. Several hundred persons make
the ascent each summer without accident, including many women and a few
children. The one risk is that accidental snow obscure the trail; but
Longs Peak is not often ascended without a guide.

The view from the summit of the entire national park, of the splendid
range south which should be in the park but is not, of the foothills and
pond-spotted plains in the east, of Denver and her mountain background,
and of the Medicine Bow and other ranges west of the park, is one of the
country's great spectacles. Longs Peak is sometimes climbed at night for
the sunrise.

The six miles of range between Longs Peak and the southern boundary of
the park show five towering snow-spotted mountains of noble beauty,
Mount Alice, Tanima Peak, Mahana Peak, Ouzel Peak, and Mount Copeland.
Tributary to the Wild Basin, which corresponds, south of Longs Peak, to
the Wild Gardens north of it, are gorges of loveliness the waters of
whose exquisite lakes swell St. Vrain Creek.

The Wild Basin is one of Rocky Mountain's land