aphic Society, the Appalachian Mountain Club, and the
Sierra Club joined in the memorialization of Congress. Six years later,
in 1899, the park was created.

II

The principal entrance to the park is up the Nisqually River at the
south. Here entered the pioneer, James Longmire, many years ago, and the
roads established by him and his fellows determined the direction of the
first national-park development. Longmire Springs, for many years the
nearest resort to the great mountain, lies just within the southern
boundary. Beyond it the road follows the Nisqually and Paradise valleys,
under glorious groves of pine, cedar, and hemlock, along ravines of
striking beauty, past waterfalls and the snout of the Nisqually Glacier,
finally to inimitable Paradise Park, its inn, its hotel camp, and its
public camping-grounds. Other centres of wilderness life have been since
established, and the marvellous north side of the park will be opened by
the construction of a northwesterly highway up the valley of the Carbon
River; already a fine trail entirely around the mountain connects these
various points of development.

But the southern entrance and Paradise Park will remain for many years
the principal centre of exploration and pleasuring. Here begins the
popular trail to the summit. Here begin the trails to many of the
finest viewpoints, the best-known falls, the most accessible of the many
exquisite interglacier gardens. Here the Nisqually Glacier is reached in
a few minutes' walk at a point particularly adapted for ice-climbing,
and the comfortable viewing of ice-falls, crevasses, caves, and other
glacier phenomena grandly exhibited in fullest beauty. It is a spot
which can have in the nature of things few equals elsewhere in scenic
variety and grandeur. On one side is the vast glistening mountain; on
the other side the high serrated Tatoosh Range spattered with perpetual
snow; in middle distance, details of long winding glaciers seamed with
crevasses; in the foreground gorgeous rolling meadows of wild flowers
dotted and bordered with equally luxuriant and richly varied forest
groves; from close-by elevations, a gorgeous tumbled wilderness of
hills, canyons, rivers, lakes, and falls backgrounded by the Cascades
and accented by distant snowy peaks; the whole pervaded by the
ever-present mountain, always the same yet grandly different, from
different points of view, in the detail of its glaciered sides.

The variety of pleasuring