its summit is wrapped in cloud. From the junction
of the Tanana and Yukon Rivers it is often visible for weeks at a time
during the winter, but is rarely seen at all after the ice goes out. A
close watch kept by friends at Tanana (the town at the confluence of the
rivers) discovered the summit on the day we reached it and the following
day (the 7th and 8th June) but not for three weeks before and not at all
afterward; from which it does not follow, however, that the summit was
not visible momentarily, or at certain hours of the day, but only that
it was not visible for long enough to be observed. The rapidity with
which that summit shrouds and clears itself is sometimes marvellous.

As is well known, the Parker-Browne party pushed up the Northeast Ridge
and the upper glacier and made a first attack upon the summit itself,
from a camp at seventeen thousand feet, on the 29th June. When within
three or four hundred feet of the top they were overwhelmed and driven
down, half frozen, by a blizzard that suddenly arose. On the 1st July
another attempt was made, but the clouds ascended and completely
enveloped the party in a cold, wind-driven mist so that retreat to camp
was again imperative. Only those who have experienced bad weather at
great heights can understand how impossible it is to proceed in the face
of it. The strongest, the hardiest, the most resolute must yield. The
party could linger no longer; food supplies were exhausted. They broke
camp and went down the mountain.

The falling short of complete success of this very gallant
mountaineering attempt seems to have been due, first to the mistake of
approaching the mountain by the most difficult route, so that it was
more than five months after starting that the actual climbing began; or,
if the survey made justified, and indeed decided, the route, then the
summit was sacrificed to the survey. But the immediate cause of the
failure was the mistake of relying upon canned pemmican for the main
food supply. This provision, hauled with infinite labor from the coast,
and carried on the backs of the party to the high levels of the
mountain, proved uneatable and useless at the very time when it was
depended upon for subsistence. There is no finer big-game country in the
world than that around the interior slopes of the Alaskan range; there
is no finer meat in the world than caribou and mountain-sheep. It is
carrying coals to Newcastle to bring canned meat into this
country-