es the hidden
chimney. F.E. Matthes, the geologist, tells of a snow level of fifty
feet depth in Indian Henry's Hunting Ground, one of Rainier's most
beautiful parks, in which the wind had sunk a crater-like hollow from
the bottom of which emerged a chimney. These snows replenish the
glaciers, which have a combined surface of forty-five square miles,
along their entire length, in addition to making enormous accumulations
in the cirques.

[Illustration: SLUISKIN RIDGE AND COLUMBIA CREST]

[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by A.H. Barnes_

MOUNT RAINIER SEEN FROM TACOMA]

Beginning then in its cirque, as a river often begins in its lake, the
glacier flows downward, river-like, along a course of least resistance.
Here it pours over a precipice in broken falls to flatten out in perfect
texture in the even stretch below. Here it plunges down rapids, breaking
into crevasses as the river in corresponding phase breaks into ripples.
Here it rises smoothly over rocks upon its bottom. Here it strikes
against a wall of rock and turns sharply. The parallel between the
glacier and the river is striking and consistent, notwithstanding that
the geologist for technical reasons will quarrel with you if you
picturesquely call your glacier a river of ice. Any elevated viewpoint
will disclose several or many of these mighty streams flowing in
snakelike curves down the mountainside, the greater streams swollen here
and there by tributaries as rivers are swollen by entering creeks. And
all eventually reach a point, determined by temperature and therefore
not constant, where the river of ice becomes the river of water.

Beginning white and pure, the glacier gradually clothes itself in rock
and dirt. Gathering as it moves narrow edges of matter filched from the
shores, later on it heaps these up upon its lower banks. They are
lateral moraines. Two merging glaciers unite the material carried on
their joined edges and form a medial moraine, a ribbon broadening and
thickening as it descends; a glacier made up of several tributaries
carries as many medial moraines. It also carries much unorganized matter
fallen from the cliffs or scraped from the bottom. Approaching the
snout, all these accumulations merge into one moraine; and so soiled has
the ice now become that it is difficult to tell which is ice and which
is rock. At its snout is an ice-cave far inside of which the resultant
river originates.

But the glacier has one very imp