t of ice-covered rock towering six thousand or seven
thousand feet above the glacier floor, the first of the very impressive
features of the mountain. The other wall of the glacier, through a
breach in which we reached its surface--the right-hand wall as we
journeyed up it--consists of a series of inaccessible cliffs deeply
seamed with snow gullies and crusted here and there with hanging
glaciers, the rock formation changing several times as one proceeds but
maintaining an unbroken rampart.

Now, it is important to remember that these two ridges which make the
walls of the Muldrow Glacier rise ultimately to the two summits of the
mountain, the right-hand wall culminating in the North Peak and the
left-hand wall in the South Peak. And the glacier lies between the walls
all the way up and separates the summits, with this qualification--that
midway in its course it is interrupted by a perpendicular ice-fall of
about four thousand feet by which its upper portion discharges into its
lower. It will help the reader to a comprehension of the ascent if this
rough sketch be borne in mind.

[Illustration: The Muldrow Glacier. Karstens in the foreground.]

The course of the glacier at the point at which we reached it is nearly
northeast and southwest (magnetic); its surface is almost level and it
is free of crevasses save at its sides. For three or four miles above
the pass it pursues its course without change of direction or much
increase in grade; then it takes a broad sweep toward the south and
grows steep and much crevassed. Three miles farther up it takes another
and more decided southerly bend, receiving two steep but short
tributaries from the northwest at an elevation of about ten thousand
feet, and finishing its lower course in another mile and a half, at an
elevation of about eleven thousand five hundred feet, with an almost due
north and south direction (magnetic).

A week after our first sight of the glacier, or on the 18th April, we
were camped at about the farthest point we had been able to see on that
occasion--just round the first bend. Our stuff had been freighted to the
pass and cached there; then, in the usual method of our advance, the
camp had been moved forward beyond the cache on to the glacier, a full
day's march. Then the team worked backward, bringing up the stuff to the
new camp. Thus three could go ahead, prospecting and staking out a trail
for further advance, while two worked with the dog team at th