ake one half the trips we have planned and secretly long for;
exclusive of our cherished ramble down the Queets!

The packs slipped from our backs at the base of a giant fir, and we
called it camp. Next to the bear who almost thrust his nose into my bed
next morning, my most vivid recollection of that camp was the blueberry
bread we concocted in the frying-pan, which was fit for the very gods of
old Olympus.

Then we climbed Olympus.

Coming on the heels of Mt. McKinley, it was no great feat of
mountaineering for the Mountain Climber, but nevertheless it combined
happily all the varied attractions of climbing. The ascent of Olympus
does, indeed, entail almost every sort of mountaineering, and some of it
reasonably difficult and dangerous. In the first place, the approach to
the mountain is perhaps its crowning feature; it is a man's sized trip
to get within striking distance, and to its inaccessibility is due the
fact that up to 1907 it was unscaled. When once reached, there are
goodly glaciers to be conquered, vast snow fields to be negotiated, some
hard ice work, and a lot of stiff climbing, all at long range from the
nearest practical base camp.

By daybreak we were under way. Through bushes, across a ravine, up a
narrow tongue of snow in a "chimney," and then over a shoulder of rock
debris, an outshoot of the lower lateral moraine of the Humes's glacier,
and we found ourselves on the seracs of the glacier's snout, with no
choice but to take to them. By the time we had found a way over the
broken green ice, with its sudden chasms, the sun was warm at our backs
and the chill of the dawn was forgotten. Then we emerged from the ice
hummocks which mightily resembled a storm-tossed sea suddenly petrified,
and commenced the leg-wearying ascent of the long snow field above,
which clothed the glacier and stretched toward a rim of dark cliffs, the
summit of the divide between us and Olympus proper. Toward the lowest
saddle in this rocky wall we set our course.

From the top of this new divide we gazed upon the clustering peaks of
Olympus across the huge glacier of the Hoh River. Jagged peaks they
were, half-clothed, at times, with clouds, their ragged rocky pinnacles
showing black in contrast to the dazzling fields of snow which stretched
away below us as in some Arctic scene.

Getting down to the Hoh glacier proved difficult work, nearly every
foothold of the descent being cut with our axes in the steep ice wall
down