he mountain, eight or nine thousand feet above us. About at
right angles to the end of the glacier, and four thousand feet above it,
is another glacier, which discharges by an almost perpendicular ice-fall
upon the floor of the glacier below.[2] The left-hand wall of the
glacier, described some pages back as a stupendous escarpment of
ice-covered rock, breaks rapidly down into a comparatively low ridge,
which sweeps to the right, encloses the head of the glacier, and then
rises rapidly to the glacier above, and still rises to form the
left-hand wall of that glacier, and finally the southern or higher peak
of the mountain.

So the upper glacier separates the two great peaks of the mountain and
discharges at right angles into the lower glacier. And the walls of the
lower glacier sweep around and rise to form the walls of the upper
glacier, and ultimately the summits of the mountain. To reach the peaks
one must first reach the upper glacier, and the southern or left-hand
wall of the lower glacier, where it breaks down into the ridge that
encloses the head of the glacier, is the only possible means by which
the upper basin may be reached. This ridge, then, called by Parker and
Browne the Northeast Ridge (and we have kept that designation, though
with some doubt as to its correctness), presented itself as the next
stage in our climb.

[Sidenote: Last Year's Earthquake]

Now just before leaving Fairbanks we had received a copy of a magazine
containing the account of the Parker-Browne climb, and in that narrative
Mr. Browne speaks of this Northeast Ridge as "a steep but practicable
snow slope," and prints a photograph which shows it as such. To our
surprise, when we first reached the head of the glacier, the ridge
offered no resemblance whatever to the description or the photograph.
The upper one-third of it was indeed as described, but at that point
there was a sudden sharp cleavage, and all below was a jumbled mass of
blocks of ice and rock in all manner of positions, with here a pinnacle
and there a great gap. Moreover, the floor of the glacier at its head
was strewn with enormous icebergs that we could not understand at all.
All at once the explanation came to us--"the earthquake"! The
Parker-Browne party had reported an earthquake which shook the whole
base of the mountain on 6th July, 1912, two days after they had come
down, and, as was learned later, the seismographic instruments at
Washington recorded it as the most