Peak.

So extraordinary a feat of strength and endurance will hardly be
accomplished again unless, perhaps, by hardy miners of the arctic
wilderness. "The North Pole's nothing to fellows like us," one of them
said later on; "once strike gold there, and we'll build a town on it in
a month."

The published records of the Parker-Browne and Stuck-Karstens
expeditions emphasize the laborious nature of the climbing. The very
isolation which gives McKinley its spectacular elevation multiplies the
difficulties of ascent by lowering the snow line thousands of feet below
the snow line of the Himalayas and Andes with their loftier surrounding
valleys. Travel on the glaciers was trying in the extreme, for much of
the way had to be sounded for hidden crevasses, and, after the selection
of each new camping place, the extensive outfit must be returned for and
sledded or carried up. Frequent barriers, often of great height, had to
be surmounted by tortuous and exhausting detours over icy cliffs and
soft snow. And always special care must be taken against avalanches;
the roar of avalanches for much of the latter journey was almost
continuous.

Toward the end, the thermometer was rarely above zero, and at night far
below; but the heat and glare of the sun was stifling and blinding
during much of the day; often they perspired profusely under their
crushing burdens, with the thermometer nearly at zero. Snow fell daily,
and often several times a day.

It is probable that no other of the world's mountain giants presents
climbing conditions so strenuous. Farming is successfully carried on in
the Himalayas far above McKinley's level of perpetual snow, and Tucker
reports having climbed a twenty-thousand-foot peak in the Andes with
less exertion than it cost the Parker-Browne party, of which he had been
a member, to mount the first forty-five hundred feet of McKinley.

While McKinley will be climbed again and again in the future, the feat
will scarcely be one of the popular amusements of the national park.

Yet Mount McKinley is the northern landmark of an immense unexplored
mountain region south of the national park, which very far surpasses the
Alps in every feature that has made the Alps world-famous. Of this
region A.H. Brooks, Chief of the Alaska Division of the United States
Geological Survey, writes:

"Here lies a rugged highland area far greater in extent than all of
Switzerland, a virgin field for explorers and mountaineers. He