ttempt upon the
mountain, of which more will be said by and by. The men in the Kantishna
camp who took part in that attempt gave us all the information they
possessed, as they had done to the party that attempted the mountain
last summer. There has been no need to make reconnoissance for routes
since these pioneers blazed the way: there is no other practicable route
than the one they discovered. The two subsequent climbing parties have
followed precisely in their footsteps up as far as the Grand Basin at
sixteen thousand feet, and it is the merest justice that such
acknowledgment be made.

At our camp the Clearwater ran parallel with the range, which rose like
a great wall before us. Our approach was not directly toward Denali but
toward an opening in the range six or eight miles to the east of the
great mountain. This opening is known as Cache Creek. Passing the willow
patch at its mouth, where previous camps had been made, we pushed up the
creek some three miles more to its forks, and there established our base
camp, on 10th April, at about four thousand feet elevation. A few
scrubby willows struggled to grow in the creek bed, but the hills that
rose from one thousand five hundred to two thousand feet around us were
bare of any vegetation save moss and were yet in the main covered with
snow. Caribou signs were plentiful everywhere, and we were no more than
settled in camp when a herd appeared in sight.

[Illustration: Entering the range by Cache Creek.

The Muldrow Glacier flows between the peak in the background (Mt.
Brooks) and the ridge just below it.]

[Sidenote: Game and Its Preparation]

Our prime concern at this camp was the gathering and preserving of a
sufficient meat supply for our subsistence on the mountain. It was an
easy task. First Karstens killed a caribou and then Walter a
mountain-sheep. Then Esaias happened into the midst of a herd of caribou
as he climbed over a ridge, and killed three. That was all we needed.
Then we went to work preparing the meat. Why should any one haul canned
pemmican hundreds of miles into the greatest game country in the world?
We made our own pemmican of the choice parts of this tender, juicy meat
and we never lost appetite for it or failed to enjoy and assimilate it.
A fifty-pound lard-can, three parts filled with water, was set on the
stove and kept supplied with joints of meat. As a batch was cooked we
took it out and put more into the same water, removed the flesh