and making roads and erecting hotels and camping shacks and cabins. There will always be many square miles of rocky fastness and mountain chasm, cut by dashing torrent, where the poor wreck of humanity may pitch his solitary camp and for a period forget the ticker and recover from the madness of money grubbing.

The best thing about the Glacier Park is its closeness and the comparative cheapness by which it can be visited. It is of us; in our midst. Hundreds, thousands, of tourists visit the great Coast Range of Alaska every year, and view towering mountain masses and gleaming glacial fields, even as others throng to Switzerland so as to tell of having seen

the far-famed Alps and of having been convoyed across a real glacier. But our Glacier Park is situated at the very starting point for Alaska, while, by those who have seen both, it is proclaimed as surpassing in variety of wild scenic beauty the most magnificent of Alpine scenery. Moreover, it is all American, and the sturdy adventurer can, if he desires, lose himself for months in its depths, fly the Stars and Stripes from his own tent-pole, and explore his own glaciers, for there are several score of them. Properly outfitted for strenuous mountaineering, he may spend a summer's season within the park, and come forth hardened, seasoned, reborn, and with an experience back of him which will be a lifelong pleasure.

Nature used titanic tools in creating these mountains and gorges, while in painting the rocks she left a riot of color. If one of the lofty pyramids or daggerlike peaks of the Livingston or Lewis Ranges, constituting this part of the Continental Divide, could be transplanted to our Eastern mountains, it would become a center for all tourist routes. It might be of glistening limestone, with iron stains, showing brilliant yellow, banded with a wide stratum of maroon rock or perhaps of deep terra-cotta or garnetred, intensified by the gleaming white of a great overlying glacier-a sheet of everlasting snow and

taking many splendid photographs and furnishing a description of its vast wealth of rock coloring.

A government topographic map, by the way, is a great thing. It will take four map sheets to cover the Glacier Park, of which three have already been surveyed by the men named. A party is now in the park

the mountain's vari-colored

sides were reflected in the bosom of a splendid lake,

the visitor would have before him one of the thousand units which constitute the sum of mountain chains of the Glacier National Park.

When any portion of the country is unknown to, or unmapped by, the United States Geological Survey, it can be set down as either very commonplace or a very impossible region. Ten years ago the Glacier Park was unknown to the intrepid topographers of this field organization, but since then the most beautiful of topographic maps have been made of the major and finest portion of what is now the park. In fact, the recent action of congress in creating the park was based largely upon the accurate information portrayed on these maps and the data procured by the members of these topographic parties-Messrs. Chapman, Sargent, Baldwin and Matthes and by Mr. Bailey Willis, who made a geologic reconnoissance of the region,

complet

ing the area. These sheets are for

sale by the Geological Survey at Washington at the absurdly nominal price of five cents each. With these maps in hand you can lose yourself in the Glacier Park and then locate yourself again. They show every mountain shape and the altitude of every point, every slope, every glacier in accurate dimension, every one of the three hundred glacial lakes, every river and creek and canyon. These maps of the park will be of inestimable use to the visitor, whether he is simply curious to identify the prominent, well known features, or whether he wishes to pick out feasible trails and mountain passes of exploration.

Now lest the ambitious tourist fear that the region may be a "playground" in the Eastern sense of the term and that the ice fields will be found to be only "play" glaciers, here is a short descriptive passage from an account by George B. Grinnell, who did some real exploratory work in the park, even before the Geological Survey's mapping. Speaking of one of the glaciers, which was later named after him, situated at the head of the Swiftcurrent Creek, Mr. Grinnell says:

"I found this glacier melting rapidly in early September. It was everywhere

extensively crevassed and pierced by deep wells into which the brooks which seamed the surface of the ice poured with loud roarings. Indeed, the rush of many waters here was fairly appalling. The tinkle of the streams above, the echoing fall of the plunging torrents and the hiss of the confined water rushing

and at length reached a place where a point of solid rock jutted out to within six feet of the edge of the ice. Here I sprang across the chasm and landed safely on the mountain side."

There are some mountains of the Glacier Park from which the storm waters and the melting glaciers find their long way into three seas-through the Saskatchewan into Hudson's Bay; through the Columbia into the Pacific Ocean, and through the Missouri into the Gulf of Mexico. Of course the glaciers are mere remnants of the once mighty ice-sheet which covered this entire por

tion of North America,

along be

neath the ice,

made up a volume of sound so great that ordinary conversation could not be heard. Though unprepared for ice work, I was anxious to climb an arm of the glacier which led directly to the mountain's crest, and not realizing the steepness of the ascent, I set out. Before I had gone half a mile over the ice I wished myself back on the rocks again, for the incline was constantly increasing. I new that if I lost. my footing and began to slide down the sloping ice I should not stop until I had fallen into one of the bottomless pits or crevasses of the main glacier; and a man who has fallen into one of these would have but scant time in which to think over his past life. To attempt to retrace my steps would be greatly to increase the danger of making a fatal slip. There was no course except to keep on climbing. I made my way to the border of the finger of ice which was embraced by two shoulders of the mountain; but next to the rock it had melted away and I looked down into a deep trench which ran back far under the ice, and from the blackness below came up the roar of the torrent and the rumble of great rocks crashing against the stream bed as they were hurried along by the water. Keeping near the edge of the ice I slowly and carefully climbed higher and higher

downward movement scoured out the original, sharp, V-shaped valleys and great canyons to their present broader Ushaped forms. Yet there are some sixty glaciers left, many of them now being from one to five square miles in extent and seamed by mighty crevasses which no man may cross. Hundreds of mountain peaks in the park rise to a height of from 6,000 to 10,000 feet, while many of the canyon walls drop away a sheer 1,000, or 2,000 or even 3,000 feet, the roaring torrents in their sombre depths cutting them deeper, deeper, by their ceaseless grind, through the slow lapse of the ages.

The Glacier Park is now our second largest "playground," being exceeded only by the Yellowstone Park, and when the adjoining region to the north is set aside as a park by the Canadian government, as is expected, it will be the greatest of American parks. At present the park region is reached by a single rail