and Walter had brought up a load each on their reconnoissance
trip; four heavy loads had been brought the day before. There were yet
two loads to be carried up from the cache below the cleavage, and Tatum
and Walter, always ready to take the brunt of it, volunteered to bring
them. So down that dreadful ridge once more the boys went, while
Karstens and the writer prospected ahead for a route into the Grand
Basin.

The storms and snows of ten or a dozen winters may make a "steep but
practicable snow slope" of the Northeast Ridge again. One winter only
had passed since the convulsion that disrupted it, and already the snow
was beginning to build up its gaps and chasms. All the summer through,
for many hours on clear days, the sun will melt those snows and the
frost at night will glaze them into ice. The more conformable ice-blocks
will gradually be cemented together, while the fierce winds that beat
upon the ridge will wear away the supports of the more egregious and
unstable blocks, and one by one they will topple into the abyss on this
side or on that. It will probably never again be the smooth, homogeneous
slope it has been; "the gable" will probably always present a wide
cleft, but the slopes beyond it, stripped now of their accumulated ice
so as to be unclimbable, may build up again and give access to the
ridge.

The point about one thousand five hundred feet above the gable, where
the earthquake cleavage took place, will perhaps remain the crux of the
climb. The ice-wall rises forty or fifty feet sheer, and the broken
masses below it are especially difficult and precipitous, but with care
and time and pains it can be surmounted even as we surmounted it. And
wind and sun and storm may mollify the forbidding abruptness of even
this break in the course of time.

[Sidenote: The Denali Problem]

With the exception of this ridge, Denali is not a mountain that presents
special mountaineering difficulties of a technical kind. Its
difficulties lie in its remoteness, its size, the great distances of
snow and ice its climbing must include the passage of, the burdens that
must be carried over those distances. We estimated that it was twenty
miles of actual linear distance from the pass by which we reached the
Muldrow Glacier to the summit. In the height of summer its snow-line
will not be higher than seven thousand feet, while at the best season
for climbing it, the spring, the snow-line is much lower. Its climbing
is, lik