the park show five towering snow-spotted mountains of noble beauty,
Mount Alice, Tanima Peak, Mahana Peak, Ouzel Peak, and Mount Copeland.
Tributary to the Wild Basin, which corresponds, south of Longs Peak, to
the Wild Gardens north of it, are gorges of loveliness the waters of
whose exquisite lakes swell St. Vrain Creek.
The Wild Basin is one of Rocky Mountain's lands of the future. The
entire west side is another, for, except for the lively settlement at
Grand Lake, its peaks and canyons, meadows, lakes, and valleys are
seldom visited. It is natural that the east side, with its broader
plateaus and showier range, should have the first development, but no
accessible country of the splendid beauty of the west side can long
remain neglected. Its unique feature is the broad and beautiful valley
of the North Fork of the Grand River, here starting for its great
adventure in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Wiswall Brothers_
SUMMIT OF LONGS PEAK, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK
Twenty-four hundred feet from water to peak, a mighty chasm carved by an
ancient glacier]
V
The Rockies are a masterpiece of erosion. When forces below the surface
began to push them high in air, their granite cores were covered
thousands of feet deep with the sediments of the great sea of whose
bottom once they were a part. The higher they rose the more insistently
frosts and rains concentrated upon their uplifting summits; in time all
sedimentary rocks were washed away, and the granite beneath exposed.
Then the frosts and rains, and later the glaciers, attacked the granite,
and carved it into the jagged forms of to-day. The glaciers moulded the
gorges which the streams had cut. The glaciers have passed, but still
the work goes on. Slowly the mountains rise, and slowly, but not so
slowly, the frosts chisel and the rains carry away. If conditions remain
as now, history will again repeat itself, and the gorgeous peaks of
to-day will decline, a million years or more from now, into the low
rounded summits of our eastern Appalachians, and later into the flat,
soil-hidden granites of Canada.
These processes may be seen in practical example. Ascend the precipitous
east side by the Flattop Trail, for instance, and notice particularly
the broad, rolling level of the continental divide. For many miles it
is nothing but a lofty, bare, undulating plain, interspersed with
summits, but easy to travel except for its accumulation of immense loose
boulders. This plain slopes gently toward the west, and presently
breaks, as on the east, into cliffs and canyons. It is a stage in the
reduction by erosion of mountains which, except for erosion, might have
risen many thousands of feet higher. Geologists call it a peneplain,
which means nearly-a-plain; it is from fragmentary remains of peneplains
that they trace ranges long ages washed away. History may, in some dim
future age, repeat still another wonder, for upon the flattened wreck of
the Front Range may rise, by some earth movement, a new and even nobler
range.
But what about the precipitous eastern front?
That masterpiece was begun by water, accomplished by ice, and finished
by water. In the beginning, streams determined the direction of the
valleys and carved these valleys deep. Then came, in very recent times,
as geologists measure earth's history, the Great Ice Age. As a result of
falling temperature, the mountains became covered, except their higher
summits and the continental divide, with glaciers. These came in at
least two invasions, and remained many hundreds of thousands of years.
When changing climate melted them away, the Rocky Mountain National Park
remained not greatly different from what it is to-day. Frosts and rains
have softened and beautified it since.
These glaciers, first forming in the beds of streams by the
accumulations of snow which presently turned to ice and moved slowly
down the valleys, began at once to pluck out blocks of granite from
their starting-points, and settle themselves in cirques. They plucked
downward and backward, undermining their cirque walls until falling
granite left precipices; armed with imprisoned rocks, they gouged and
scraped their beds, and these processes, constantly repeated for
thousands of centuries, produced the mountain forms, the giant gorges,
the enormous precipices, and the rounded granite valleys of the
stupendous east elevation of the Front Range.
There is a good illustration in Iceberg Lake, near the base of Trail
Ridge on the Ute Trail. This precipitous well, which every visitor to
Rocky Mountain should see, originally was an ice-filled hollow in the
high surface of the ridge. When the Fall River Glacier moved eastward,
the ice in the hollow slipped down to join it, and by that very motion
became itself a glacier. Downward and backward plucking in the cirque
which it presently made, and the falling of the undermined walls,
produced in, say, a few hundred thousand years this striking well, upon
whose lake's surface visitors of to-day will find cakes of floating ice,
broken from the sloping snow-field which is the old glacier's remainder
and representative of to-day.
The glaciers which shaped Rocky Mountain's big canyons had enormous size
and thickness. Ice streams from scores of glacial cirques joined
fan-like to form the Wild Basin Glacier, which swept out through the
narrow valley of St. Vrain. Four glaciers headed at Longs Peak, one west
of Mount Meeker, which gave into the Wild Basin; one west of Longs Peak,
which joined the combination of glaciers that hollowed Loch Vale; one
upon the north, which moulded Glacier Gorge; and the small but powerful
glacier which hollowed the great Chasm on the east front of Longs Peak.
The Loch Vale and Glacier Gorge glaciers joined with giant ice streams
as far north as Tyndall Gorge to form the Bartholf Glacier; and north of
that the mighty Thompson Glacier drained the divide to the head of
Forest Canyon, while the Fall River Glacier drained the Mummy Range
south of Hagues Peak.
These undoubtedly were the main glacial streams of those ancient days,
the agencies responsible for the gorgeous spectacle we now enjoy. The
greater glaciers reached a thickness of two thousand feet; they have
left records scratched high upon the granite walls.
As the glaciers moved down their valleys they carried, imprisoned in
their bodies and heaped upon their backs and sides, the plunder from
their wreckage of the range. This they heaped as large moraines in the
broad valleys. The moraines of the Rocky Mountain National Park are
unequalled, in my observation, for number, size, and story-telling
ability. They are conspicuous features of the great plateau upon the
east, and of the broad valley of the Grand River west of the park. Even
the casual visitor of a day is stirred to curiosity by the straight,
high wall of the great moraine for which Moraine Park is named, and by
the high curved hill which springs from the northeastern shoulder of
Longs Peak, and encircles the eastern foot of Mount Meeker.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Willis T. Lee_
THE ANDREWS GLACIER HANGS FROM THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
A glacier in the Rocky Mountain National Park which can be studied by
visitors]
[Illustration: _From a photograph by H.T. Cowling_
A ROCKY MOUNTAIN CIRQUE CARVED FROM SOLID GRANITE
Iceberg Lake was cut eighteen hundred feet deep by an ancient glacier]
These and other moraines are fascinating features of any visit to Rocky
Mountain National Park. The motor roads disclose them, the trails travel
them. In combination with the gulfs, the shelved canyons and the scarred
and serrated peaks and walls, these moraines offer the visitor a
thrilling mystery story of the past, the unravelling of whose threads
and the reconstruction of whose plot and climax will add zest and
interest to a summer's outing, and bring him, incidentally, in close
communion with nature in a thousand happy moods.
VI
The limitations of a chapter permit no mention of the gigantic
prehistoric monsters of land, sea, and air which once haunted the site
of this noble park, nor description of its more intimate beauties, nor
detail of its mountaineering joys; for all of which and much other
invaluable information I refer those interested to publications of the
National Park Service, Department of the Interior, by Doctor Willis T.
Lee and Major Roger W. Toll. But something must be told of its early
history.
In 1819 the exploring expedition which President Madison sent west under
Colonel S.H. Long, while camping at the mouth of La Poudre River, was
greatly impressed by the magnificence of a lofty, square-topped
mountain. They approached it no nearer, but named it Longs Peak, in
honor of their leader. Parkman records seeing it in 1845.
The pioneers, of course, knew the country. Deer, elk, and sheep were
probably hunted there in the forties and fifties. Joel Estes, the first
settler, built a cabin in the foothills in 1860, hence the title of
Estes Park. James Nugent, afterward widely celebrated as "Rocky Mountain
Jim," arrived in 1868. Others followed slowly.
William N. Byers, founder of the _Rocky Mountain News_, made the first
attempt to climb Longs Peak in 1864. He did not succeed then, but four
years later, with a party which included Major J.W. Powell, who made the
first exploration of the Grand Canyon the following year, he made the
summit. In 1871 the Reverend E.J. Lamb, the first regular guide on Longs
Peak, made the first descent by the east precipice, a dangerous feat.
The Earl of Dunraven visited Estes Park in 1871, attracted by the big
game hunting, and bought land. He projected an immense preserve, and
induced men to file claims which he planned to acquire after they had
secured possession; but the claims were disallowed. Albert Bierstadt
visited Dunraven in 1874, and painted canvases which are famous in
American art.
It was Dunraven, also, who built the first hotel. Tourists began to
arrive in 1865. In 1874 the first stage line was established, coming in
from Longmont. Telephone connection was made in 1906.
Under the name of Estes Park, the region prospered. Fifty thousand
people were estimated to have visited it in 1914. It was not, however,
till the national park was created, in 1915, that the mountains assumed
considerable importance except as an agreeable and inspiring background
to the broad plateau.
V
McKINLEY, GIANT OF GIANTS
MOUNT MCKINLEY NATIONAL PARK, ALASKA. AREA, ABOUT 2,200 SQUARE MILES
The monster mountain of this continent, "the majestic, snow-crowned
American monarch," as General Greeley called it, was made a national
park in 1917. Mount McKinley rises 20,300 feet above tide-water, and
17,000 feet above the eyes of the beholder standing on the plateau at
its base. Scenically, it is the highest mountain in the world, for those
summits of the Andes and Himalayas which are loftier as measured from
sea level, can be viewed closely only from valleys whose altitudes range
from 10,000 to 15,000 feet. Its enormous bulk is shrouded in perpetual
snow two-thirds down from its summit, and the foothills and broad plains
upon its north and west are populated with mountain sheep and caribou in
unprecedented numbers.
To appreciate Mount McKinley's place among national parks, one must know
what it means in the anatomy of the continent. The western margin of
North America is bordered by a broad mountainous belt known as the
Pacific System, which extends from Mexico northwesterly into and through
Alaska, to the very end of the Aleutian Islands, and includes such
celebrated ranges as the Sierra Nevada, the Cascade, and the St. Elias.
In Alaska, at the head of Cook Inlet, it swings a sharp curve to the
southwest and becomes Alaska's mountain axis. This sharp curve, for all
the world like a monstrous granite hinge connecting the northwesterly
and southwesterly limbs of the System, is the gigantic Alaska Range,
which is higher and broader than the Sierra Nevada, and of greater
relief and extent than the Alps. Near the centre of this range, its
climax in position, height, bulk, and majesty, stands Mount McKinley.
Its glistening peak can be seen on clear days in most directions for two
hundred miles.
For many years Mount St. Elias, with its eighteen thousand feet of
altitude, was considered North America's loftiest summit. That was
because it stands in that part of Alaska which was first developed. The
Klondike region, far northward, was well on the way to development
before McKinley became officially recognized as the mountain climax of
the continent. But that does not mean that it remained unknown. The
natives of the Cook Inlet country on the east knew it as Doleika, and
tell you that it is the rock which a god threw at his eloping wife. They
say it was once a volcano, which is not the fact. The Aleutes on the
south called it Traleika, the big mountain. The natives of the Kuskokwim
country on the west knew it as Denalai, the god, father of the great
range. The Russians who established the first permanent white settlement
in Alaska on Kodiak Island knew it as Bulshia Gora, the great mountain.
Captain Cook, who in 1778 explored the inlet which since has borne his
name, does not mention it, but Vancouver in 1794 unquestionably meant it
in his reference to "distant stupendous mountains."
After the United States acquired Alaska, in 1867, there is little
mention of it for some years. But Frank Densmore, an explorer of 1889,
entered the Kuskokwim region, and took such glowing accounts of its
magnificence back to the Yukon that for years it was known through the
settlements as Densmore's Mountain. In 1885 Lieutenant Henry C. Allen,
U.S.A., made a sketch of the range from his skin boat on the Tanana
River, a hundred and fifty miles away, which is the earliest known
picture of McKinley.
Meantime the neighborhood was invaded by prospectors from both sides.
The Cook Inlet gold fields were exploited in 1894. Two years later W.A.
Dickey and his partner, Monks, two young Princeton graduates, exploring
north from their workings, recognized the mountain's commanding
proportions and named it Mount McKinley, by which it rapidly became
known, and was entered on the early maps. With crude instruments
improvised on the spot, Dickey estimated the mountain's height as twenty
thousand feet--a real achievement. When Belmore Browne, who climbed the
great peak in 1912, asked Dickey why he chose the name, Dickey told him
that he was so disgusted with the free-silver arguments of men
travelling with him that he named the mountain after the most ardent
gold-standard man he knew.
The War Department sent several parties to the region during the next
few years to explore, and the United States Geological Survey, beginning
in 1898 with the Eldridge-Muldrow party, has had topographical and
geological parties in the region almost continuously since. In 1915 the
Government began the railroad from Seward to Fairbanks. Its course lies
from Cook Inlet up the Susitna River to the headwaters of the Nenana
River, where it crosses the range. This will make access to the region
easy and comfortable. It was to safeguard the enormous game herds from
the hordes of hunters which the railroad was expected to bring rather
than to conserve an alpine region scenically unequalled that Congress
set aside twenty-two hundred square miles under the name of the Mount
McKinley National Park.
From the white sides of McKinley and his giant neighbors descend
glaciers of enormous bulk and great length. Their waters drain on the
east and south, through the Susitna River and its tributaries, into the
Pacific; and on the north and west, through tributaries of the Yukon and
Kuskokwim, into Bering Sea.
The south side of McKinley is forbidding in the extreme, but its north
and west fronts pass abruptly into a plateau of gravels, sands, and
silts twenty-five hundred to three thousand feet in altitude, whose
gentle valleys lead the traveller up to the very sides of the granite
monster, and whose mosses and grasses pasture the caribou.
The national park boundaries enclose immense areas of this plateau. The
contours of its rounded rolling elevations mark the courses of
innumerable streams, and occasionally abut upon great sweeping glaciers.
Low as it is, the plateau is generally above timber-line. The day will
come when roads will wind through its valleys, and hotels and camps will
nestle in its sheltered hollows; while the great herds of caribou, more
than one of which has been estimated at fifteen hundred animals, will
pasture like sheep within close range of the camera. For the wild
animals of McKinley National Park, having never been hunted, were
fearless of the explorers, and now will never learn to fear man. The
same is true in lesser measure of the more timid mountain sheep which
frequent the foothills in numbers not known elsewhere. Charles Sheldon
counted more than five hundred in one ordinary day's foot journey
through the valleys.
The magic of summer life on this sunlit plateau, with its limitless
distances, its rushing streams, its enormous crawling glaciers, its
waving grasses, its sweeping gentle valleys, its myriad friendly
animals, and, back of all and commanding all, its never-forgotten and
ever-controlling presence, the shining Range and Master Mountain,
powerfully grip imagination and memory. One never can look long away
from the mountain, whose delicate rose tint differentiates it from other
great mountains. Here is ever present an intimate sense of the infinite,
which is reminiscent of that pang which sometimes one may get by gazing
long into the starry zenith. From many points of view McKinley looks
its giant size. As the climber ascends the basal ridges there are places
where its height and bulk appall.
Along the northern edge of the park lies the Kantishna mining district.
In 1906 there was a wild stampede to this region. Diamond City, Bearpaw
City, Glacier City, McKinley City, Roosevelt, and other rude mining
settlements came into rapid existence. Results did not adequately reward
the thousands who flocked to the new field, and the "cities" were
abandoned. A hundred or two miners remain, scattered thinly over a large
area, which is forested here and there with scrubby growths, and, in
localities, is remarkably productive of cultivated fruits and
vegetables.
Few know and few will know Mount McKinley. It is too monstrous for any
but the hardiest to discover its ice-protected secrets. The South Peak,
which is the summit, has been climbed twice, once by the Parker-Browne
party in 1912, after two previous unsuccessful expeditions, and once,
the year following, by the party of Archdeacon Hudson Stuck, who
gratified an ambition which had arisen out of his many years of
strenuous missionary work among the Alaskan Indians. From the records of
these two parties we gather nearly all that is known of the mountain.
The North Peak, which is several hundred feet lower, was climbed by
Anderson and Taylor of the Tom Lloyd party, in 1913.
From each of these peaks an enormous buttressing ridge sweeps northward
until it merges into the foothills and the great plain. These ridges
are roughly parallel, and carry between them the Denali Glacier, to
adopt Belmore Browne's suggested name, and its forks and tributaries. Up
this glacier is the difficult passage to the summit. Tremendous as it
is, the greatest perhaps of the north side, the Denali Glacier by no
means compares with the giants which flow from the southern front.
In 1903 Judge James Wickersham, afterward Delegate to Congress from
Alaska, made the first attempt to climb McKinley; it failed through his
underestimation of the extensive equipment necessary. In 1906 Doctor
Frederick A. Cook, who meantime also had made an unsuccessful attempt
from the north side, led an expedition from the south which included
Professor Herschel Parker of Columbia University, and Mr. Belmore
Browne, artist, explorer, and big game hunter. Ascending the Yentna
River, it reached a point upon the Tokositna Glacier beyond which
progress was impossible, and returned to Cook Inlet and disbanded.
Parker returned to New York, and Cook proposed that Browne should lay in
a needed supply of game while he, with a packer named Barrill, should
make what he described as a rapid reconnaissance preparatory to a
further attempt upon the summit the following year. Browne wanted to
accompany him, but was overpersuaded. Cook and Barrill then ascended the
Susitna, struck into the country due south of McKinley, and returned to
Tyonik with the announcement that they had reached the summit. Cook
exhibited a photograph of Barrill standing upon a crag, which he said
was the summit. A long and painful controversy followed upon Cook's
return east with this claim.
In all probability the object of the Parker-Browne expedition of 1910
was as much to follow Cook's course and check his claim as to reach the
summit. The first object was attained, and Herman L. Tucker, a national
forester, was photographed standing on the identical crag upon which
Cook had photographed Barrill four years before. This crag was found
miles south of McKinley, with other peaks higher than its own
intervening. From here the party advanced up a glacier of enormous size
to the very foot of the upper reaches of the mountain's south side, but
was stopped by gigantic snow walls, which defeated every attempt to
cross. "At the slightest touch of the sun," writes Browne, "the great
cliffs literally _smoke_ with avalanches."
The Parker-Browne expedition undertaken in 1912 for purposes of
exploration, also approached from the south, but, following the Susitna
River farther up, crossed the Alaska Range with dog trains to the north
side at a hitherto unexplored point. Just before crossing the divide it
entered what five years later became the Mount McKinley National Park,
and, against an April blizzard, descended into a land of many gorgeous
glaciers. "We were now," writes Belmore Browne, "in a wilderness
paradise. The mountains had a wild, picturesque look, due to their bare
rock summits, and big game was abundant. We were wild with enthusiasm
over the beauty of it all, and every few minutes as we jogged along some
one would gaze fondly at the surrounding mountains and ejaculate: 'This
is sure a white man's country.'"
Of these "happy hunting grounds," as Browne chapters the park country in
his book, Stephen R. Capps of the United States Geological Survey says
in his report:
"Probably no part of America is so well supplied with wild game,
unprotected by reserves, as the area on the north slope of the Alaska
Range, west of the Nanana River. This region has been so little visited
by white men that the game herds have, until recent years, been little
molested by hunters. The white mountain sheep are particularly abundant
in the main Alaska Range, and in the more rugged foothills. Caribou are
plentiful throughout the entire area, and were seen in bands numbering
many hundred individuals. Moose are numerous in the lowlands, and range
over all the area in which timber occurs. Black bears may be seen in or
near timbered lands, and grizzly bears range from the rugged mountains
to the lowlands. Rabbits and ptarmigan are at times remarkably
numerous."