ange. This will make access to the region
easy and comfortable. It was to safeguard the enormous game herds from
the hordes of hunters which the railroad was expected to bring rather
than to conserve an alpine region scenically unequalled that Congress
set aside twenty-two hundred square miles under the name of the Mount
McKinley National Park.

From the white sides of McKinley and his giant neighbors descend
glaciers of enormous bulk and great length. Their waters drain on the
east and south, through the Susitna River and its tributaries, into the
Pacific; and on the north and west, through tributaries of the Yukon and
Kuskokwim, into Bering Sea.

The south side of McKinley is forbidding in the extreme, but its north
and west fronts pass abruptly into a plateau of gravels, sands, and
silts twenty-five hundred to three thousand feet in altitude, whose
gentle valleys lead the traveller up to the very sides of the granite
monster, and whose mosses and grasses pasture the caribou.

The national park boundaries enclose immense areas of this plateau. The
contours of its rounded rolling elevations mark the courses of
innumerable streams, and occasionally abut upon great sweeping glaciers.
Low as it is, the plateau is generally above timber-line. The day will
come when roads will wind through its valleys, and hotels and camps will
nestle in its sheltered hollows; while the great herds of caribou, more
than one of which has been estimated at fifteen hundred animals, will
pasture like sheep within close range of the camera. For the wild
animals of McKinley National Park, having never been hunted, were
fearless of the explorers, and now will never learn to fear man. The
same is true in lesser measure of the more timid mountain sheep which
frequent the foothills in numbers not known elsewhere. Charles Sheldon
counted more than five hundred in one ordinary day's foot journey
through the valleys.

The magic of summer life on this sunlit plateau, with its limitless
distances, its rushing streams, its enormous crawling glaciers, its
waving grasses, its sweeping gentle valleys, its myriad friendly
animals, and, back of all and commanding all, its never-forgotten and
ever-controlling presence, the shining Range and Master Mountain,
powerfully grip imagination and memory. One never can look long away
from the mountain, whose delicate rose tint differentiates it from other
great mountains. Here is ever present an intimate sense of the