infinite,
which is reminiscent of that pang which sometimes one may get by gazing
long into the starry zenith. From many points of view McKinley looks
its giant size. As the climber ascends the basal ridges there are places
where its height and bulk appall.

Along the northern edge of the park lies the Kantishna mining district.
In 1906 there was a wild stampede to this region. Diamond City, Bearpaw
City, Glacier City, McKinley City, Roosevelt, and other rude mining
settlements came into rapid existence. Results did not adequately reward
the thousands who flocked to the new field, and the "cities" were
abandoned. A hundred or two miners remain, scattered thinly over a large
area, which is forested here and there with scrubby growths, and, in
localities, is remarkably productive of cultivated fruits and
vegetables.

Few know and few will know Mount McKinley. It is too monstrous for any
but the hardiest to discover its ice-protected secrets. The South Peak,
which is the summit, has been climbed twice, once by the Parker-Browne
party in 1912, after two previous unsuccessful expeditions, and once,
the year following, by the party of Archdeacon Hudson Stuck, who
gratified an ambition which had arisen out of his many years of
strenuous missionary work among the Alaskan Indians. From the records of
these two parties we gather nearly all that is known of the mountain.
The North Peak, which is several hundred feet lower, was climbed by
Anderson and Taylor of the Tom Lloyd party, in 1913.

From each of these peaks an enormous buttressing ridge sweeps northward
until it merges into the foothills and the great plain. These ridges
are roughly parallel, and carry between them the Denali Glacier, to
adopt Belmore Browne's suggested name, and its forks and tributaries. Up
this glacier is the difficult passage to the summit. Tremendous as it
is, the greatest perhaps of the north side, the Denali Glacier by no
means compares with the giants which flow from the southern front.

In 1903 Judge James Wickersham, afterward Delegate to Congress from
Alaska, made the first attempt to climb McKinley; it failed through his
underestimation of the extensive equipment necessary. In 1906 Doctor
Frederick A. Cook, who meantime also had made an unsuccessful attempt
from the north side, led an expedition from the south which included
Professor Herschel Parker of Columbia University, and Mr. Belmore
Browne, artist, explorer, and big game hunter. Asc