-the south one a little higher than the
north." Ignoring official and recognized nomenclature, and calling
McKinley and Foraker by their Kuskokwim Indian names, he writes of Mount
Foraker: "Denali's Wife does not appear at all save from the actual
summit of Denali, for she is completely hidden by his South Peak, until
the moment when his South Peak is surmounted. And never was nobler sight
displayed to man than that great isolated mountain spread out
completely, with all its spurs and ridges, its cliffs and its glaciers,
lofty and mighty, and yet far beneath us."

"Above us," he writes a few pages later, "the sky took on a blue so deep
that none of us had ever gazed upon a midday sky like it before. It was
deep, rich, lustrous, transparent blue, as dark as Prussian blue, but
intensely blue; a hue so strange, so increasingly impressive, that to
one at least it 'seemed like special news of God,' as a new poet sings.
We first noticed the darkening tint of the upper sky in the Grand Basin,
and it deepened as we rose. Tyndall observed and discussed this
phenomenon in the Alps, but it seems scarcely to have been mentioned
since."

A couple of months before the Parker-Browne party started for the top,
there was an ascent of the lower North Peak which, for sheer daring and
endurance must rank high in the history of adventure. Four prospectors
and miners from the Kantishna region organized by Tom Lloyd, took
advantage of the hard ice of May, and an idle dog team, to make for the
summit. Their motive seems to have been little more than to plant a pole
where it could be seen by telescope, as they thought, from Fairbanks;
that was why they chose the North Peak. They used no ropes, alpenstocks,
or scientific equipment of any sort, and carried only one camera, the
chance possession of McGonagall.

[Illustration: _From a photograph by G.B. Gordon_

MOUNT McKINLEY, LOOMING ABOVE THE GREAT ALASKAN RANGE]

[Illustration: _From a photograph by LaVoy_

ARCHDEACON STUCK'S PARTY HALF-WAY UP THE MOUNTAIN]

[Illustration: THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT McKINLEY]

They made their last camp at an altitude of eleven thousand feet. Here
Lloyd remained, while Anderson, Taylor, and McGonagall attempted the
summit in one day's supreme effort. Near the top McGonagall was overcome
by mountain sickness. Anderson and Taylor went on and planted their pole
near the North summit, where the Stuck-Karstens party saw it a year
later in their ascent of the South