Ridge, in honor of the man who, with Walter's help, cut
that staircase three miles long amid the perilous complexities of its
chaotic ice-blocks.

When we reached the Parker Pass all the world beneath us was shrouded in
dense mist, but all above us was bathed in bright sunshine. The great
slabs of granite were like a gateway through which the Grand Basin
opened to our view.

The ice of the upper glacier, which fills the Grand Basin, came
terracing down from some four thousand feet above us and six miles
beyond us, with progressive leaps of jagged blue serac between the two
peaks of the mountain, and, almost at our feet, fell away with cataract
curve to its precipitation four thousand feet below us. Across the
glacier were the sheer, dark cliffs of the North Peak, soaring to an
almost immediate summit twenty thousand feet above the sea; on the left,
in the distance, was just visible the receding snow dome of the South
Peak, with its two horns some five hundred feet higher. The mists were
passing from the distant summits, curtain after curtain of gauze draping
their heads for a moment and sweeping on.

We made our camp between the granite slabs on the natural camping site
that offered itself, and a shovel and an empty alcohol-can proclaimed
that our predecessors of last year had done the same.

The next morning the weather had almost completely cleared, and the view
below us burst upon our eyes as we came out of the tent into the still
air.

[Sidenote: Parker Pass]

The Parker Pass is the most splendid coigne of vantage on the whole
mountain, except the summit itself. From an elevation of something more
than fifteen thousand feet one overlooks the whole Alaskan range, and
the scope of view to the east, to the northeast, and to the southeast is
uninterrupted. Mountain range rises beyond mountain range, until only
the snowy summits are visible in the great distance, and one knows that
beyond the last of them lies the open sea. The near-by peaks and ridges,
red with granite or black with shale and gullied from top to bottom with
snow and ice, the broad highways of the glaciers at their feet carrying
parallel moraines that look like giant tram-lines, stand out with vivid
distinction. A lofty peak, that we suppose is Mount Hunter, towers above
the lesser summits. The two arms of the Muldrow Glacier start right in
the foreground and reveal themselves from their heads to their junction
and then to the terminal snout, rece