they discovered the pass that gives
easy access to the Muldrow Glacier. On 25th March the party had
traversed the glacier and reached its head with dogs and supplies. A
camp was made on the ridge, while further prospecting was carried on
toward the upper glacier. This was the farthest point that Lloyd
reached. On 10th April, Taylor, Anderson, and McGonogill set out about
two in the morning with great climbing-irons strapped to their moccasins
and hooked pike-poles in their hands. Disdaining the rope and cutting no
steps, it was "every man for himself," with reliance solely upon the
_crampons_. They went up the ridge to the Grand Basin, crossed the ice
to the North Peak, and proceeded to climb it, carrying the fourteen-foot
flagstaff with them. Within perhaps five hundred feet of the summit,
McGonogill, outstripped by Taylor and Anderson, and fearful of the
return over the slippery ice-incrusted rocks if he went farther, turned
back, but Taylor and Anderson reached the top (about twenty thousand
feet above the sea) and firmly planted the flagstaff, which is there
yet.

[Sidenote: Lloyd and McGonogill]

This is the true narrative of a most extraordinary feat, unique--the
writer has no hesitation in claiming--in all the annals of
mountaineering. He has been at the pains of talking with every member of
the actual climbing party with a view to sifting the matter thoroughly.

For, largely by the fault of these men themselves, through a mistaken
though not unchivalrous sense of loyalty to the organizer of the
expedition, much incredulity was aroused in Alaska touching their
exploit. It was most unfortunate that any mystery was made about the
details, most unfortunate that in the newspaper accounts false claims
were set up. Surely the merest common sense should have dictated that in
the account of an ascent undertaken with the prime purpose of proving
that Doctor Cook had _not_ made the ascent, and had falsified his
narrative, everything should be frank and aboveboard; but it was not so.

A narrative, gathered from Lloyd himself and agreed to by the others,
was reduced to writing by Mr. W. E. Thompson, an able journalist of
Fairbanks, and was sold to a newspaper syndicate. The account the writer
has examined was "featured" in the New York Sunday _Times_ of the 5th
June, 1910.

In that account Lloyd is made to claim unequivocally that he himself
reached both summits of the mountain. "There were two summits and we
climbed