ss]

The photograph of the base camp shows a mountainous ridge stretching
across much of the background. That ridge belongs to the outer wall of
the Muldrow Glacier and indicates its general direction. Just beyond the
picture, to the right, the ridge breaks down, and the little valley in
the middle distance sweeps around, becomes a steep, narrow gulch, and
ends at the breach in the glacier wall. This breach, thus reached, is
the pass which the Kantishna miners of the "pioneer" expedition
discovered and named "McPhee Pass," after a Fairbanks saloon-keeper. The
name should stand. There is no other pass by which the glacier can be
reached; certainly none at all above, and probably no convenient one
below. Unless this pass were used, it would be necessary to make the
long and difficult journey to the snout of the glacier, some twenty
miles farther to the east, cross its rough terminal moraine, and
traverse all its lower stretch.

On the 11th April Karstens and I wound our way up the narrow, steep
defile for about three miles from the base camp and came to our first
sight of the Muldrow Glacier, some two thousand five hundred feet above
camp and six thousand, three hundred feet above the sea. That day stands
out in recollection as one of the notable days of the whole ascent.
There the glacier stretched away, broad and level--the road to the heart
of the mountain, and as our eyes traced its course our spirits leaped up
that at last we were entered upon our real task. One of us, at least,
knew something of the dangers and difficulties its apparently smooth
surface concealed, yet to both of us it had an infinite attractiveness,
for it was the highway of desire.

CHAPTER II

THE MULDROW GLACIER

Right opposite McPhee Pass, across the glacier, perhaps at this point
half a mile wide, rises a bold pyramidal peak, twelve thousand or
thirteen thousand feet high, which we would like to name Mount Farthing,
in honor of the memory of a very noble gentlewoman who died at the
mission at Nenana three years ago, unless, unknown to us, it already
bear some other name.[1] Walter and our two Indian boys had been under
her instruction.

At the base of this peak two branches of the glacier unite, coming down
in the same general direction and together draining the snows of the
whole eastern face of the mountain. The dividing wall between them,
almost up to their head and termination, is one stupendous, well-nigh
vertical escarpmen