 Part six of the Book of the National Parks. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Sterling-Yard. The proposed Roosevelt National Park, including the present Sequoia National Park, West Central California, area 1,600 square miles. Where the lava billows of the Cascade Mountains end in Northern California, the granite knobs of the Sierra begin. Sharply differentiated in appearance and nature a few miles further in either direction, hear their terminals overlap and so nearly merge that the southern end of the one and the northern beginning of the other are not easily distinguished by the untrained eye. But southward, the Sierra Nevada, the snowy sawtoothed range of the Spaniards, the Sierra of the modern American phrase, rapidly acquires the bulk and towering height, the craggy, cirque summits, and the snowy shoulders which have made it celebrated. Gathering grandeur as it sweeps southward close to the western boundary of California, its western slopes slash deep with canyons, its granite peaks and domes pushing ever higher above the scattering forests of its middle zones, its eastern ramparts dropping in precipices to the desert, it valiantly guards its sunny state against the passage of eastern highways and forces hard engineering problems upon the builders of transcontinental railroads. Where it becomes the eastern boundary of the Yosemite National Park, it breaks into climaxes of magnificence. From this point on the Sierra broadens and bulks, it throws out spurs, multiplies paralleling ranges, heaps peaks and ridges between gulf-like canyons which carry roaring waters through their forested trenches. Pushing ever higher above Timberline, it breaks into large, lake-bearing cirques, sometimes cirque within cirque, walled in silvery granite, hung with garlands of snow, and dripping with shining glaciers. 90 miles south of Yosemite, it culminates in a close grouping of snow-dobbed, glacier gouged, lightning-splintered peaks, one of which, Mount Whitney, highest summit in the United States, raises his head just a little above his gigantic neighbors. South of Whitney, the Sierra subsides rapidly and merges into the high plateaus and minor ranges of southern California. 75 miles of the crest of this titanic range at the climax of its magnificence, 65 miles of it north of Whitney and 10 miles of it south, constitute the western boundary of an area of 1600 square miles, which Congress is considering setting apart under the title of the Roosevelt National Park, a region so particularly characterized by ruggedness, power, and unified purpose that it is eminently fitted to serve as the nation's memorial to Theodore Roosevelt. Besides its topendous mountains, it includes the wildest and most exuberant forested canyons and the most luxuriant groves in the United States. For its boundaries will enclose also the present Sequoia National Park, in which a million trunks of the famous Sequoia Washingtoniana cluster around the General Sherman tree, believed to be the biggest and oldest living thing in all the world. Wide though its range from bleak crest to warm forest, every part of this region is a necessary part of its whole. Nature's subtle finger has so knitted each succeeding zone into the fabric of its neighbors that it would be a vandal's hand which would arbitrarily cut the picture short of the full completion of its perfect composition. It is one of nature's masterpieces, through whose extremist contrast runs the common note of supremacy. Whether or not then Congress ensures its perpetuity and unified development, we can consider it scenically only as a whole. Similar in kind to the Yosemite National Park, Roosevelt is far ruggeder and more masterful. It will be the national park of superlatives. Yet each of these similar areas is a completed unit of striking individuality. Yosemite, taking its note from its incomparable valley, will never be equaled for sheer beauty. Roosevelt knows no peer for exuberance and grandeur. Yosemite will remain mecca for the tourist. Roosevelt will draw into its forest of giant trees and upon its shoulders of chiseled granite thousands of campers out and lovers of the high trail. Joined near the crest of the Sierra by the John Muir Trail, California's memorial to her own prophet of the out-of-doors, these two national parks, so alike and yet so different, each striking surely its own note of sublimity, or in a very real sense, parts of one still greater whole, the marriage of beauty and strength. 2. The region is roughly pear-shaped. A straight line drawn from Pine Creek Pass at its northern end to Sheep Mountain on the southern baseline measures 68 miles. The park is 36 miles wide at its widest, just north of Mount Whitney. Its eastern boundary, the crest of the Sierra, divides many notable peaks. From north to south we pass, as we travel the John Muir Trail, Mount Humphreys, 13,972 feet, Mount Darwin, 13,841 feet, Mount Winchill, 13,749 feet, Split Mountain, 14,051 feet, Striped Mountain, 13,160 feet, Mount Baxter, 13,118 feet, Junction Peak, 13,903 feet, Mount Tindall, 14,025 feet, and Mount Whitney, 14,501 feet. Supporting Whitney on the south is Mount Langley, 14,042 feet, all these connected by splintered peaks, granite ledges, and mountain masses scarcely less in altitude. Between the bristling crest of this snow-dobbed eastern boundary and the park's western boundary, thousands of feet lower where the forests begin, the region roughly divides into parallel zones. That which immediately adjoins the crest upon its west side, a strip ten miles or more in width, is known to its devotees as the High Sierra. It is a country of tremendous jagged peaks, of intermediate pinnacled walls, of enormous cirks holding remnants of once mighty glaciers, of great fields of sun-cuped snow, of turquoise lakes resting in chains upon enormous granite steps, the hull gleaming like chased silver in the noon sun, a magical land of a thousand matterhorns whose trails lead from temple to temple, so mighty of size and noble of design that no mind less than the creators could ever have conceived them. The High Sierra has been celebrated for many years in the fast-growing brotherhood of American mountain climbers, east as well as west, many of whom proclaim its marked superiority to all parts of the Swiss Alps except the amazing neighborhood of Mont Blanc. With the multiplication of trails and the building of shelters for the comfort of the inexperienced, the various amateurs of city business life will find in these mountains of perpetual sunshine a satisfaction which is only for the seasoned mountaineer abroad. The zone adjoining the High Sierra upon its west side is one of far wider range of pleasure. Subsiding rapidly in elevation, it becomes a knobbed and bolder land which includes timber-line and the thin forests of wind-twisted pines which contend with the granite for foothold. It is crossed westward by many lesser ranges buttressing the High Sierra. From these cross ranges many loftier peaks arise and between them roar the rivers whose thousands of contributing streams drain the snow fields and the glaciers of the White Heights. Finally, paralleling the western boundary is the narrow zone in which this region meets and merges with the greater forests and the meadows beyond the boundary. Here in the southwestern corner is the marvelous warm forest in which trees of many kinds attain their maximum of size and proportion and which encloses a million sequoia trees including the greatest and oldest embodiments of the principle of life. This extraordinary forest was reserved in 1890 under the title of the Sequoia National Park. At the same time was created the General Grant National Park a reservation of four square miles of similar forest virtually a part of it but separated because of an intervening area of privately owned lands. Thus does this region run the gamut of supremacy from the High Sierra upon its east to the giant forest upon its west. Of no less distinction are its waters innumerable lakelets of the High Sierra born of the snows overflow in tiny streams which combine into roaring frothing creeks. These in turn, augmented by the drainage of the lofty tumble divides combine into powerful little rivers. Four river systems originate in this region. Far in the north a lake more than 11,000 feet high lying at the western foot of Mount Goddard begins the south fork of the San Joaquin River which drains the park's northern area. Incidentally it has cut a canyon of romantic beauty up which the John Muir trail finds its way into the park. The northern middle of the park is drained by the middle and south forks of the King's River which find their origins in perhaps 40 miles of Sierra's crest. The drainage basins of these splendid streams cover nearly half of the park's total area and include some of the biggest as well as some of the wildest and most beautiful mountain scenery in the world. Bounded upon their west by an arc of snowy mountains separated by the gigantic monarch divide flanked by twisted ranges and towering peaks they cascade westward through meadows of ranked grasses and vividly colored wildflowers alternating with steep side gorges and canyons of sublimity. Dropping thousands of feet within a few miles they abound in cascades and majestic falls between which swift rapids alternate with reaches of stiller but never still waters which are the homes of cutthroat trout. Each of these rivers has its canyon of distinguished magnificence. The Tehipite Valley of the Middle Fork and the King's River Canyon of the South Fork are destined to world celebrity. The southwestern area of the park is drained by five forks of the beautiful Kauia River. These streams originate on the north in the divide of the South Fork of the King's River and on the east in a conspicuously fine range known as the Great Western Divide. They wind through the wooded valleys of the Sequoia National Park. Upon their banks grow the monsters of the American forest. The southern area is drained by the Kern River into which flow the waters of Mount Whitney and his giant neighbors. The Kern Canyon is one of Roosevelt's noblest expressions. Flowing southward between precipitous walls three thousand feet in mooring height flanked upon the east by the monsters of the High Sierra and on the west by the splendid elevations of the Great Western Divide it is a valley supremely fitted for the highest realization of the region's gifts of enjoyment. From camps beside its trout-haunted waters it is a matter of no difficulty for those equipped for the trail to reach the summit of Whitney on the one hand and the giant forest on the other. Near the southern boundary of the park Golden Trout Creek enters the Kern. It originates at the very crest of the Sierra which it follows closely for many miles before swinging westward to its outlet. In this stream is found a trout which appears when fresh caught as though carved from gold. Popularly it is known as the Golden Trout. Its scientific name is Salmo Rooseveltii. Originally, no doubt, the color evolved from the peculiar golden hues of the rocks through which its waters flow. The golden trout has been transplanted into other Sierra streams in some of which, notably the upper waters of the Middle Fork of the Kings, it has thrived and maintained its vivid hue. In sheltered waters it has apparently disappeared a fact which may merely mean that its color has changed with environment. There are many gateways, two by road, the rest by trail. For years to come, as in the past, the great majority of visitors will enter through the giant forest of the Sequoia National Park and through the General Grant National Park. The traveler by rail will find motor stages at Visilia for the run into the giant forest and at Fresno for the General Grant National Park. The motorists will find good roads into both from California's elaborate highway system. The traveler will find excellent hotel camps and if his purpose is to live a while under his private canvas, public campgrounds convenient to stores and equipped with water supply and even electric lights. Under the gigantic pines, furs, and ancient Sequoias of these extraordinary forests, increasing thousands spend summer weeks and months. From these centers the lovers of the sublime take saddle horses and pack trains or if they are hikers, burrows to carry their equipment and follow the trails to Kern Canyon or the summit of Whitney or the Kings River Canyon or the Tehipite Valley or the John Muir Trail upon the Sierra's crest. Many are the trip combinations, the choice of which depends upon the time and the strenuousness of the traveler. Camping out on the trail in Roosevelt is an experience which demands repetition. Sure of clear weather, the traveler does not bother with tents but snuggles at night in a sleeping bag under a roof of spreading pine. But it is possible to equip for the trail elsewhere. The principal point upon the north is the Yosemite National Park where one may provide himself with horses and supplies for a journey of any desired duration. Starting in the Yosemite Valley and leaving the park near the carved Sirks of Mount Lyle, the traveler will find the intervening miles of the John Muir Trail a panorama of magnificence. Thousand Island Lake reflecting the glorious pyramid of Banner Peak, the Devil's Postpile, a group of basaltic columns far finer than Ireland's celebrated Giant's Causeway, the Mono Valley with its ancient volcano split down through the middle so that all may see its vent and spreading crater are merely the more striking features of a progress of spectacles to the north entrance of Roosevelt Park. This is at the junction of the south fork of the San Joaquin River and Payute Creek. The principal eastern gateway is Curesarge Pass on the crest of the Sierra a few miles north of Mount Whitney. The trail ascends from Independence where one also may comfortably outfit. These four are at this writing the principal entrance gates, each opening from points at which parties may be sure of securing horses, equipment and guides, but several other trails enter from the east, south, southwest and west sides. All of these in time will become with development, well-traveled trails into the heart of the Great Wilderness. 4. Any description of the glories of the John Muir trail from its entrance into the park to its climax upon the summit of Mount Whitney far passes the limits of a chapter. In time it will inspire a literature. Approaching from Yosemite through the canyon of the San Joaquin, the traveler swings around the north side of Mount Goddard, crosses gorgeous Muir Pass and enters the fringe of cirques and lakes which borders the western edge of Sierra's crest from end to end. Through this he winds his way southward, skirting lakes, crossing snow fields, encircling temple cirques, plunging into canyons, climbing divides, rounding gigantic peaks, surprising views of sublimity, mounting ever higher until he stands upon the shoulders of Mount Whitney. Dismounting here he scrambles up the few hundred feet of stiff climb which places him on the summit, from which he looks out north, west south, over the most diversified high mountain landscape in America and eastward over the Sierra foothills to Death Valley, lowest land in the United States. No thrilling alpine feet is the ascent of our loftiest summit but those who want to measure human strength and skill in terms of perpendicular granite may find among Whitney's neighbors, peaks which will present harder problems than those offered abroad, peaks which themselves will may become as celebrated in future years. The John Muir Trail is destined to a fame and a use, perhaps many times as great as those men thought who conceived it as a memorial to a lover of the trail and of all that that implies. It will play a distinguished part in the education of the nation in the love of mountains. It will win artists to a phase of the sublime in America which they have overlooked. It will bring students to the classrooms where nature displays her most tremendous exhibits. Nevertheless, Roosevelt's lower levels will draw many times as many devotees as will the High Sierra and these visitors will stay longer. It is the valleys and the canyons which will prove the greatest lure for here one may camp leisurely and in entire comfort and then make what trips he chooses into the regions of the peaks and the serks. There are literally thousands of canyons and of many kinds. Besides the Kern Canyon there are too which must rank with Yosemite. In the summer of 1916 I traveled the length of the park as far as the giant forest with a party led by director Stephen T. Mathur of the National Park Service then assistant to the secretary of the interior and was powerfully impressed with the scenic qualities of the Tehipite Valley and the King's River Canyon at the time little known. Time will not dim my memory of the Tehipite Dome the Auguste Valley and the leaping, singing river which it looks. Well short of the Yosemite Valley and the kind of beauty that plunges the observer into silence the Tehipite Valley far excels it in bigness, power and majesty. Look out point on the north rim a couple of miles south of the dome gave us our first sensation. Three thousand feet above the river it offered by far the grandest valley view I have looked upon for the rim view into Yosemite by comparison is not so grand as it is beautiful. The canyon revealed itself to the east as far as Mount Woodworth its lofty, diversified walls lifting precipitously from the heavy forests of the floor and sides and yielding to still greater heights above. Enormous cliffs abutted Yosemite-like at intervals. South of us directly across the canyon rose the strenuous heights of the monarch divide. Mount Harrington towering a thousand feet higher above the valley floor then clouds rest in harmony. Down the slopes of the monarch divide, seemingly from its turd at summits, cascaded many frothing streams. The eagle peaks, blue canyon falls silver spur, the gorge of despair, lost canyon these were some of the romantic and appropriate titles we found on the geological survey map. And close at hand opposite Mount Harrington and just across Crown Creek Canyon rose mighty to Hippite. We stood level at its rounded glistening dome. The to Hippite dome is a true Yosemite feature. It compares in height and prominence with El Capitan. In fact, it stands higher above the valley floor and occupies a similar position at the valley's western gate. It is not so massive as El Capitan and therefore not so impressive, but it is superb. It is better compared with Half Dome though again perhaps not so impressive but it has its own August quality as notably so as either of these world-famed rocks and if it stood in the Yosemite would share with them the incomparable valley's highest honors. Descending to the floor the whole aspect of the valley changed looking up to Hippite dome now outlined against the sky and the neighboring abrupt castillated walls towered more hugely than ever. We did not need the contour map to know that some of these heights exceeded Yosemites. The skyline was fantastically carved into spires and domes, a counterpart in gigantic miniature of the great Sierra of which it was the valley climax. The Yosemite measure of sublimity perhaps lacked but in its place was a more rugged grandeur, a certain suggestion of vastness and power that I have not seen elsewhere. This impression was strengthened by the floor itself, which contains no suggestion whatever of Yosemite's exquisiteness. Instead it offers rugged spaciousness. In place of Yosemite's peaceful woods and meadows here were tangled, giant studded thickets and mountainous masses of enormous broken talus. Instead of the quiet winding merced, here was a surging smashing, frothing, cascading, roaring torrent several times its volume which filled the valley with its turbulence. One step foot on the valley floor and all thought of comparison with Yosemite vanishes forever. This is a different thing altogether but a thing in its own way no less superlative. The keynote of the Tahipite valley is wild exuberance. It thrills where Yosemite innervates yet its temperature is quite as mild. The middle fore contains more trout than any other stream I have fished. We found them in pools and riffles everywhere. No water was too white to get a rise. In the long greenish white borders of fast rapids they floated continually into view. In five minutes watching I could count a dozen or more such appearances within a few feet of water. They ran from 8 to 14 inches. No doubt larger ones lay below. So I got great fun by picking my particular trout and casting specially for him. Stop your fly's motion and the pursuing fish instantly stops. Bax swims round the lure in a tour of examination and disappears. Started moving and he instantly appears from the white depth where no doubt he has been cautiously watching a pause and a swift start often tempted to a strike. These rainbows of the torrents are hard fighters and many of them if un-gently handled availed of swift currents to thrash themselves free. You must fish a river to appreciate it standing on its edges leaping from rock to rock slipping way steep at times waiting recklessly to reach some pool or eddy of special promise searching the rapids peering under the alders testing the pools. That's the way to make friends with a river. You study its moods and its ways as those of a meddlesome horse. And after a while its spirit seeps through and finds yours its personality unveils a sweet friendliness unites you a sense of mutual understanding there follows the completest detachment that I know years and the worries disappear you and the river dream away the unnoted hours Passing on from the Tahitbite valley to the Kings River canyon the approach to Granite Pass was nothing short of magnificent. We crossed a superb cirque studded with lakelets we could see the pass ahead of us on a fine snow-crowned bench we ascended the bench and found ourselves not in the pass but in the entrance to still another cirque also Lake Studded a loftier nobler cirque circling the one below ahead of us upon another lofty bench surely was the pass those inspiring snow-dobbed heights whose serrated edges cut sharply into the sky certainly marked the supreme summit our winding trail up steep rocky ascents pointed true an hour's toil would carry us over but the hour passed and the crossing of the shelf disclosed not the glowing valley of the south fork across the pass but a still nobler cirque above sublime in arctic glory how the vast glaciers that cut these titantic carvings must have swirled among these huge concentric walls pouring over this shelf and that piling together around these uplifting granite peaks concentrating combined effort upon this unyielding mass and that and beaten back pouring down the torturous main channel with rendings and tearing unimaginable granite pass is astonishing we saw no less than four of these vast concentric cirques through three of which we passed and the geological survey map discloses a tributary basin adjoining which enclosed a group of large volcanic lakes and doubtless other vast cirque-like chambers we took photographs but knew them vain a long dusty descent of copper creek brought us near Dezan into the exquisite valley of the south fork of the king's river the king's river canyon still another Yosemite it is not so easy to differentiate the two canyons of the king's they are similar and yet very different perhaps the difference lies chiefly in degree both lie east in west with enormous rocky bluffs rising on either side of rivers of quite extraordinary beauty both present carved incastalated walls of exceptional boldness of design both are heavily and magnificently wooded the forest reaching up sharp slopes on either side both possessed to a marked degree the quality that lifts them above the average of even the Sierra's glacial valleys but the outlines here seem to be softer the valley floor broader the river less turbulent if the keynote of the tehipite valley is wild exuberance that of the king's river canyon is wild beauty the one excites the other lulls the one shares with the Yosemite the distinction of extraordinary outline the other shares with the Yosemite the distinction of extraordinary charm there are few nobler spots than the junction of copper creek with the king's the grand sentinel is seldom surpassed it fails of the personality of El Capitan half dome into hip-pite but it only just fails if they did not exist it would become the most celebrated rock in the Sierra at least the view up the canyon from this spot has few equals the view down the canyon is not often excelled when the day of the king's river canyon dawns it will dawn brilliantly five the western slopes of the pacific ranges from the canadian border southward to the desert carry the most luxuriant forest in the united states the immense stands of yellow pine and douglas fir of the far north merge into the sugar pines and giant sequoias of the south and practically an unbroken belt which on Sierra's slopes lies on the middle levels between the low productive plains of the west and the towering heights of the east the sequoia national park and its little neighbor the general grant national park enclosed areas of remarkable fertility in which trees shrubs and wildflowers reach their greatest development the million sequoia trees which grow here are a very small part numerically of this amazing forest these slopes are rich with the soil of thousands of years of accumulations they are warmed in summer by mild pacific winds heated in their passage across the lowlands and blanketed in winter by many feet of soft snow they are damp with countless springs and streams sheltered under heavy canopies of foliage in altitude they range from two thousand feet at the bottom of kawiyas canyon as it emerges from the park to eight thousand feet in the east with mountains rising three or four thousand feet higher it is a tumbled land of ridges and canyons but its slopes are easy and its outline gracious oases of luscious meadows dot the forest this is the court of king sequoia here assemble an everlasting attendance millions of his nobles that ever bowed the knee before the human potentate erect majestic clothed in togas of perpetual green their heads bear to the heavens stand rank upon rank mile upon mile the noblest personalities of the earth chief among the courtiers of the king is the sugar pine towering here his full two hundred feet straight as a ruler his stem at times eight feet in thickness scarcely tapering to the heavy limbs of his high crown largest and most magnificent of the pacific pines reaching sometimes six hundred years of age the greater trunks clear themselves of branches a hundred feet from the ground and the bark develops long dark plates of armor so marked is his distinguished personality that once seen he never can be mistaken for another next in rank and scarcely less in majesty is the massive white fur rising at times even to two hundred feet his sometimes six foot trunk conspicuously rough dark brown in color deeply furrowed with ash and gray his pale yellow green crown is mysteriously tinged with white his limit of age is three hundred and fifty years last of the ranking trio is the western yellow pine a warrior clad in plates of russet armor a hundred and sixty feet in natural height here he sometimes towers even with his fellow knights he guards the outer precincts of the court his cap of yellow green his branching arms resting upon his sides these are the great nobles but with them are millions of lesser courtiers the incense cedar from his buttress tapered trunks spring countless branches tipped like plumes many lesser conifers the splendid pacific birches in picturesque pose the oaks of many kinds far different from their eastern cousins and among the feet of these courtiers of higher degree crowd millions upon millions of flowering shrubs massing often in solid phalluses disputing passage with the deer all mingle together great and small the conifers in the king's honor flaunt from stem and greater branch long fluttering ribbons of pale green moss thousands of squirrels chatter in the branches millions of birds make music it is a gala day enter the king the king of trees is of royal lineage the patient searchers in the rocks of old have traced his ancestry unknown millions of years back to the farce of the Cretaceous period his was viking stock from arctic zones where trees can live no more today he links all human history the identical tree around which gather thousands of human courtiers every year emerged a seedling will never Knesser besiege Jerusalem no man knows how old his predecessors were when finally they sank into death mighty fall but John Newer counted four thousand rings in the trunk of one fallen giant who must have lived while Pharaoh still held captive the children of Israel the general Sherman tree of the giant forest the oldest living thing today so far as I have been able to ascertain probably has seen thirty six hundred years it is evident to the unlearned observer that while mature he is long short of the turn of life a thousand years from now he may still be the earth's biggest and oldest living thing how much beyond that none may venture to predict picture now the giant forest largest of the several sequoia groves in the sequoia national park you have entered say in the dusk of the night before and after breakfast wander planless among the trees on every side rise the huge pines and furs their dark columns springing from the tangled brush to support the cathedral roof above here an enormous purplish red column draws and holds your astonished eye it is a gigantic thing in comparison with its monster neighbors it glows among their dull columns it is clean and spotless amid their moss hung trunks branchless it disappears among their upper foliage hinting at steeple heights above yet your guide tells you that this tree is small that its diameter is less than twenty feet that in age it is a youngster of only two thousand years wait he tells you till you see the general sherman trees thirty six and a half feet of diameter wait till you see the hundreds yes thousands which surpass this infant but you heed him not for you see another back among those sugar pines yes and there's another and there on the left are two or three in a clump back in the dim cathedral aisles are reddish glows which must mean still others your heart is beating with a strange emotion you look up at the enormous limbs bent at right angles at the canopy of feathery foliage hanging in ten thousand huge plumes you cry aloud for the sheer joy of this great and plunge into the forest heart the giant forest contain several thousand sequoia trees of large size and many young trees you see these small ones on every hand erect sharply pointed giving in every line a vivid impression of quivering bounding life later on as they emerge above the roof of the forest for some of them are more than three hundred feet high they lose their sharp ambitious tops they become gracefully rounded springing from seed less than a quarter of an inch in diameter they tend like their cousins the redwoods to grow in groups and these groups tend to grow in groves but there are scattering individuals in every grove and many small isolated groves in the Sierra the giant forest is the largest grove of greatest trees the general grant grove in a small national park of its own nearby is the second grove in size and importance its central figure is the general grant tree second in size and age to the general Sherman tree the dimensions of the greatest trees are astonishing glance at this table name height in feet and diameter in feet giant forest grove general Sherman two hundred seventy nine point nine feet high thirty six point five feet in diameter Abraham Lincoln two hundred seventy feet in height thirty one feet in diameter William McKinley two hundred ninety one feet in height twenty eight feet in diameter Muir grove Dalton two hundred ninety two feet in height twenty seven feet in diameter Garfield grove California two hundred sixty feet in height thirty feet in diameter general grant grove general grant two hundred sixty four feet in height thirty five feet in diameter George Washington two hundred fifty five feet in height twenty nine feet in diameter The theater Roosevelt Tree, which has not been measured at this writing, is one of the noblest of all, perfect in form and color, abounding in the glory of young maturity. To help realization at home of the majesty of the General Sherman Tree, mark its base diameter, thirty-six and a half feet, plainly against the side of some building, preferably a church with a steeple and neighboring trees, then measure two hundred and eighty feet, its height, upon the ground at right angles to the church. Then stand on that spot, and facing the church, imagine the trunk rising, tapering slightly against the building's side and the sky above it. Then slowly lift your eyes, until you are looking up into the sky at an angle of forty-five degrees, this to fix its height as if it were growing in front of the church. Imagine its lowest branches, each far thicker than the trunks of eastern elms and oaks, pushing horizontally out at a height above the ground of a hundred and fifty feet, which is higher than the tops of most of the full-grown trees of our eastern forests. Imagine these limbs bent horizontally at right angles, like huge elbows, as though holding its green mantle close upon its form. Imagine the upper branches nearly bare, shattered perhaps by lightning, and imagine its crown of foliage, dark yellowish-green, hanging in enormous graceful plumes. This is the king of trees. And of Part 6. Part 7 of the Book of the National Parks. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Sterling Yard. The Heart of the Rockies. The Rocky Mountain National Park, north-central Colorado, area 398 square miles. The Sierra Nevada Mountains of California and the Cascade Range of California, Oregon, and Washington have each three national parks which fully represent their kind and quality. The Great Central System of the United States, the Rocky Mountains, which also possesses three national parks, are represented in kind by only one. For Yellowstone is an exceptional volcanic interlude, and Glacier is the chance upheaval of shales and limestones from a period antedating the granite rockies by many millions of years. Neither in any sense exhibits the nature and scenic quality of the backbone of our continent. This is one of the reasons for the extraordinary distinction of the reservation appropriately called the Rocky Mountain National Park, namely that it is the only true example of the continental mountain system in the catalog of our national parks. It is well therefore to lay the foundations for a sound comprehension of its differentiating features. The Rocky Mountains, which began to rise at the close of the Cretaceous period at a rate so slow that geologists think they are making a pace today as rapid as their maximum, extend from the plateau of New Mexico, north-westerly, until they merge into the mountains of eastern Alaska. In the United States, physiographers consider them in two groups, the northern rockies and the southern rockies, the point of division being the elevated Wyoming basin. There are numerous ranges known like the Wasatch Mountains by different names, which nevertheless are consistent parts of the Rocky Mountain system. The Rockies attain their most imposing mass and magnificence in their southern group, culminating in Colorado. So stupendous is this heaping together of granitic masses that in Colorado alone are found 42 of the 55 named peaks in the United States, which attain the altitude of 14,000 feet. Of the others, 12 are in the Sierra of California and one Mount Rainier in Washington. Mount Elbert in Colorado, our second highest peak, rises within 82 feet of the height of California's Mount Whitney, our first in rank. Colorado's Mount Massive attains an altitude only four feet less than Washington's Mount Rainier, which ranks third. In point of mass, one seventh of Colorado rises above 10,000 feet of altitude. The state contains 350 peaks above 11,000 feet of altitude, 220 peaks above 12,000 feet, and 150 peaks above 13,000 feet. Besides the 42 named peaks which exceed 14,000 feet, there are at least three others which are unnamed. Geologists call the Rockies young, by which they mean anything, say, from 5 to 20 million years. They are more or less contemporary with the Sierra. Like the Sierra, the mountains we see today are not the first. Several times their ranges have uplifted upon wrecks of former ranges, which have yielded to the assaults of frost and rain. Before they first appeared, parts of the eastern Appalachians had paralleled our eastern seacoast for many million years. The age of mammals had well dawned before they became a feature in a landscape which previously had been a mid-continental sea. Two. The front range carrying the continental divide is a gnarled and jagged rampart of snow-splashed granite facing the eastern plains, from which its grim summits may be seen for many miles. Standing out before it like captains in front of gray ranks at parade, rise three conspicuous mountains. Longs Peak, 50 miles northwest of Denver, Mount Evans, west of Denver, and Pikes Peak, 70 miles to the south. Longs Peak is directly connected with the continental divide by a series of jagged cliffs. Mount Evans is farther away. Pikes Peak stands sentinel-like, 75 miles east of the range, a gigantic Manadnok, remainder and reminder of a former range long ages worn away. Though many massive mountains of greater altitude lie farther west, the front range for many reasons is representative of the rocky snowblast. To represent them fully, the National Park should include the three sentinel peaks and their neighborhoods, and it is earnestly hoped that the day will come when Congress will recognize this need. At this writing, only the section of greatest variety and magnificence, the nearly 400 square miles of which Longs Peak is the climax, has been thus entitled. In fact, even this was unfortunately curtailed in the making, the straight southern boundary having been arbitrarily drawn through the range at a point of sublimity, throwing out of the park the St. Vrain Glaciers, which form one of the region's wildest and noblest spectacles, and Arapaho Peak and its glaciers, which in several respects constitute a climax in Rocky Mountain scenery. Thus carelessly cropped, despoiled of the completeness which nature meant it to possess, nevertheless the Rocky Mountain National Park is a reservation of distinguished charm and beauty. It straddles the continental divide, which bisects it lengthwise north and south. The western slopes rise gently to the divide. At the divide the eastern front drops in a precipice several thousand feet deep, out of which frosts, rains, glaciers and streams have gouged gigantic gulfs and granite-bound veils and canyons, whose intervening cliffs are battle-minted walls and monoliths. As if these features were not enough to differentiate this national park from any other, nature has provided still another element of popularity and distinction. East of this splendid rampart spreads a broad area of rolling plateau, carpeted with wildflowers, edged and dotted with luxuriant groves of pine, spruce, fir and aspen, and diversified with hills and craggy mountains, carved rock walls, long forest-grown moraines, and picturesque ravines. A stream-watered, lake-dotted summer and winter pleasure paradise of great size, bounded on the north and west by snow-spattered monsters and on the east and south by craggy wooded foothills only less in size and no less in beauty than the Leviathans of the main range. Here is summer living room for several hundred thousand sojourners from whose comfortable camps and hotels the wild heart of the Rockies may be visited a foot or on horseback between early breakfast and late supper at home. This plateau has been known to summer visitors for many years under the titles of several settlements, Moraine Park, Horseshoe Park, and Long's Peak. Each had its hotels long before the National Park was created. Estes Park and Allen's Park on the east side and Grand Lake on the west side lie just outside the park boundaries, purposely excluded because of their considerable areas of privately-owned land. Estes Park, the principal village and the distributing center of all incoming routes from the east, is the eastern gateway. Grand Lake is the western gateway. And still there is another distinction, one which will probably always hold for Rocky Mountain, its present great lead in popularity. That is its position nearer to the middle of the country than any other great national parks and its accessibility from large centers of population. Denver, which claims with some justice the title of gateway to the national parks, meaning of course the eastern gateway to the western parks, is within 30 hours by rail from Chicago and St. Louis, through one or other of which most travelers from the east find it convenient to reach the west. It is similarly conveniently located for touring motorists, with whom all the national parks are becoming ever more popular. From Denver several railroads lead to east side towns, from which the park is reached by motor stages through the foothills, and a motor stage line runs directly from Denver to Estes Park, paralleling the range. The west side is reached through Granby. 3. Entry to the park by any route is dramatic. If the visitor comes the all motorway through Ward, he picks up the range at Arapaho Peak, and follows it closely for miles. If he comes by any of the railroads, his motor stage emerges from the foothills upon a sudden spectacle of magnificence, the snowy range, its highest summits crowned with cloud, looming upon the horizon across the peaceful plateau. By any route, the appearance of the range begins a panorama of ever-changing beauty and inspiration, whose progress will outlive many a summer's day. Having settled himself in one of the hotels or camps of the east side plateau, the visitor faces the choice between two practical ways of enjoying himself. He may, as the majority seem to prefer, spend his weeks in the simple recreations familiar in our eastern hill and country resorts. He may motor a little, walk a little, fish a little in the big Thompson and its tributaries, read and botanize a little in the meadows and groves, golf a little on the excellent courses, climb a little on the lesser mountains, and dance or play bridge in hotel parlors at night. Or else he may avail himself of the extraordinary opportunity which nature offers him in the mountains, which spring from his comfortable plateau, the opportunity of entering into nature's very workshop and of studying with her for his teacher the inner secrets and the mighty examples of creation. In all our national parks I have wondered at the contentment of the multitude with the less when the greater and such a greater was there for the taking. But I cease to criticize the so cold popular point of view when I realize that its principal cause was ignorance of the wealth within grass rather than deliberate choice of the more commonplace. Instead I write this book hoping that it may help the cause of the greater pleasure. Especially is the Rocky Mountain National Park the land of opportunity because of its accessibility and of the ease with which its inmost sanctuaries may be entered examined and appreciated. The story is disclosed at every step. In fact the revelation begins in the foothills on the way in from the railroad. For the red iron-stained cliffs seen upon their eastern edges are remainders of former rocky mountains which disappeared by erosion millions of years ago. The foothills themselves are remnants of mountains which once were much loftier than now and the picturesque canyon of the big Thompson through which it may have been your good fortune to enter the park is the stream cut outlet of a lake or a group of lakes which once covered much of the national park plateau. Summer life on the plateau is as effective as a tonic. The altitude varies from seven to nine thousand feet. Rocky Mountains Valley bottoms are higher than the summits of many peaks of celebrity elsewhere. On every hand stretch miles of tumbled meadows and craggy cliffs. Many are the excellent roads upon which cluster at intervals of miles groups of hotels and camps. Here one may choose his own fashion of living. For these hostelries range from the most formal and luxurious hotel to the simplest collection of tents or log cabins around the central log dining structure. Some of these camps are picturesque the growth of years from the original log hut. Some are equipped with modern comforts others are as primitive as their beginnings. All the larger resorts have stables of riding horses. For riding is the fashion even with those who do not venture into the mountains. Or one may camp out in the good old fashioned way and fry his own morning bacon over his fire of sticks. Wherever one lives however one lives in this broad table land he is under the spell of the range. The call of the mountains is ever present. Riding, walking, motoring, fishing, golfing, sitting under the trees with a book continually he lifts his eyes to their calm heights. Unconsciously he throws them the first morning glance. Instinctively he gazes long upon their gleaming moonlit summits before turning in at night. In time they possess his spirit. They calm him, exalt him and noble him. Unconsciously he comes to know them all in their myriad moods. Cold and stern before sunrise, brilliant and vivid in mid-morning, soft and restful toward evening, gorgeously colored at sunset, angry at times terrifying in storm, their fascination never weakens, their beauty changes but it does not lessen. Mountains of the height of these live in constant communion with the sky. Mummy mountain in the north and longs peak in the south continually gather handfuls of fleecy cloud. A dozen times a day a mist appears in the blue as if entangled while passing the towering summit. A few moments later it is a tiny cloud then while you watch it thickens and spreads and hides the peak. Ten minutes later perhaps it dissipates as rapidly as it gathered leaving the granite photographed against the blue or it may broaden and settle till it covers a vast acreage of sky and drops a brief shower in nearby valleys while meadows half a mile away are steeped in sunshine. Then in a twinkling all is clear again. Sometimes when the clearing comes the summit is white with snow and sometimes standing upon a high peak in a blaze of sunshine from a cleared sky one may look down for a few moments upon the top of one of these settled clouds knowing that it is sprinkling the hidden valley. The charm of the mountains from below may satisfy many but sooner or later temptation is sure to beset. The desire comes to see close up those monsters of mystery. Many including most women ignorant of rewards refuse to venture because they fear hardship. I can never climb mountains in this rarefied air pleads one and in most cases this is true. It is important that persons unused to the higher altitudes be temperate and discreet but the lungs and muscles of a well trained mountain horse are always obtainable and the least practice will teach the unaccustomed rider that all he has to do is sit his saddle limply and leave everything else to the horse. It is my proud boast that I can climb any mountain no matter how high and difficult up which my horse can carry me and so at last and inevitably we ascend into the mountains. Four. The mountains within the park fall naturally in two groupings. The front range cuts the southern boundary midway and runs north to Long's Peak where it swings westerly and carries the continental divide out of the park at its northwestern corner. The mummy range occupies the park's entire north end. The two are joined by a ridge 11,500 feet in altitude over which the Fall River Road is building to connect the east and west sides of the park. The lesser of these two, the mummy range, is a mountain group of distinguished beauty. Its climax is an arc of grey monsters. Ypsilon Mountain, 13,507 feet, Mount Fairchild, 13,502 feet, Hague's Peak, 13,562 feet and Mount Dunraven, 12,326 feet. These gather around Mummy Mountain with its 13,413 feet. A noble company indeed, herded in close comradeship, the center of many square miles of summits scarcely less. Ypsilon's big Greek letter, outlined in perpetual snow, is one of the famous landmarks of the northern end. Hague's Peak supports Hallet Glacier, the most interesting in the park. Dunraven, aloof and of slenderer outline, offers marked contrast to the enormous sprawling bulk of mummy, always pretentious, often capped with clouds. The range is split by many fine canyons and dotted with glacial lakes, an undeveloped wilderness designed by kindly nature for summer exploration. But it is the front range, the snowy, pinnacled rampart, which commands profound attention. From Spesselman Mountain in the far northwest, a spill of lava, now the haunt of mountain sheep, the continental divide, southward piles climax upon climax. Following it at an elevation, while exceeding 12,000 feet, the hardy, venturesome climber looks westward down a slope of bold granite, thickly strewn with boulders. Eastward he gazes into a succession of gigantic gorges, dropping upon the east, forest-grown, lakeset canyons, deep and mid-foreground, the great plateau spreading to its foothills far beyond the canyons, with now and then a sun glint from some irrigation pond beyond the foothills on the misty plains of eastern Colorado. Past the monolith of Teratelma Peak, with its fine glacial gorge of many lakes, past the sprayed glacier, largest of the several shrunken fields of moving ice which still remain, he finds, from the summit of Flat Top Mountain, a broad spectacle of real sublimity. But there is a greater viewpoint close at hand, crossing the Flat Top Trail, which here ascends from the settlements below, on its way to the west side, and skirting the top of the Tyndall Glacier, a scramble of four hundred feet lands him on the summit of Hallad Peak, 12,725 feet in altitude. Here indeed is reward. Below him lies the sheer abyss of the Tyndall Gorge, Dream Lake, a drop of turquoise in its depths. Beyond it a moraine reaches out upon the plateau, six miles in length, a mile and more in width, nearly a thousand feet in height, holding Birstad Lake upon its levelled forest crown, an eloquent reminder of that ancient time when enormous glaciers ripped the granite from these gorges to heap it in long winding hills upon the plains below. Turning southerly, the wild gardens further spread before his gaze, a tumble of granite masses rising from lake-dotted, richly forested bottoms. The entrance to Loch Vale, Gem Canyon of the Rockies, lies in the valley foreground. Adjoining it, the entrance to Glacier Gorge, showing one of its several lakes, rests in peaceful contrast with its impressive eastern wall, a long, winding, sharp-edge buttress pushing southward and upward to support the northern shoulder of the monster Longs Peak, whose squared summit, from here for all the world like a chef's cap, outlines sharply against the sky. Hallad Peak welcomes the climber to the heart of the Rockies at perhaps their most gorgeous point. South of Hallad, difficult going will disclose new viewpoints of supreme wildness. Otis Peak, nearly as high as Hallad, looks down upon the Andrews Glacier and displays the length of Loch Vale, at whose head towers Taylor Peak, a giant exceeding 13,000 feet. I have not sketched this tour of the continental divide as a suggestion for travel, for there are no trails, and none but the mountaineer, experienced in pioneering, could accomplish it with pleasure and success, but as a convenient mode of picturing the glories of the continental divide. Some day a trail, even perhaps a road, for one is practicable, should make it fully accessible to the greater public. Meantime, Flat Top Trail invites valley dwellers of all degrees, a foot and horseback, up to a point on the divide from which Hallad's summit and its stupendous view is no great conquest. The gorgeous of the wild gardens are most enjoyed from below. Trails of no difficulty lead from the settlements to Fern and Odessa Lakes, in a canyon unsurpassed, to Bear Lake at the outlet of the Tyndall Gorge, to Loch Vale, whose flower-carpeted terraces and cirque lakelets, Sky Pond and the Lake of the Glass, are encircled with mighty canyon walls, and to Glacier Gorge, which leads to the foot of Longs Peak's Western precipice. These are spots, each a day's round trip from convenient overnight hotels, which deserve all the fame that will be theirs when the people come to know them, for as yet, only a few hundreds a summer of Rocky Mountains Hundred Thousand, take the trouble to visit them. To better understand the charm of these gray monsters, and the valleys and chasms between their knees, we must pause a moment to picture what architects call the planting. For trees and shrubs and flowers play as important a part in the informal architectural scheme of the Front Range, as they do in the formality of a palace. It will be recalled that the zones of vegetation from the equator to the frozen ice fields of the far north find their counterparts in altitude. The foothills bordering the Rocky Mountain National Park lie in the austral zone of our Middle and Eastern States. Its splendid east side plateau and inter-mountain valleys represent the luxuriance of the Canadian Zone. Its mountains pass rapidly up in a few thousand feet through the Hudsonian Zone, including Timberline at about 11,500 feet, and its highest summits carry only the mosses, lichens, stunted grasses, and tiny alpine flowerettes of the Arctic Zone. Thus one may walk waist-deep through the marvelous wildflower meadows of Loch Vale, bordered by luxuriant forests of majestic Engelman spruce, pines, furs, junipers, and many deciduous shrubs, and look upward at the gradations of all vegetation to the Arctic Seas. Especially interesting is the revelation when one takes it in order, climbing into the range. The Fall River Road displays it, but not dramatically. The forest approach is too long, the climb into the Hudsonian Zone too short and not typical. The same is true of the trail of beautiful forest canyon. The reverse is true of the Ute Trail, which brings one too quickly to the stupendous Arctic summit of Trail Ridge. The flat-top trail is in many respects the most satisfying, particularly if one takes the time to make the summit of Hallet Peak and hunts for arctic flowerettes on the way. But one may also accomplish the purpose in Loch Vale by climbing all the way to Sky Pond at the very foot of steep Little Taylor Glacier, or by ascending Glacier Gorge to its head, or by climbing the Twin Sisters, or Longs Peak, as far as Boulder Field, or up the St. Vrain Valley to the top of Meadow Mountain or Mount Copeland. All of these ascents are made by fair trails and all display the fascinating spectacle of Timberline, which in Rocky Mountain National Park, I believe, attains its most satisfying popular expression, by which I mean that here the panorama of the everlasting struggle between the ambitious climbing forests and the winter gales of the summits seems to be condensed and summarized, to borrow a figure from the textbooks as I have not happened to find it elsewhere. Following up sheltered forest ravine to its head, we swing out upon the windswept slopes leading straight to the summit. Snow patches increase in size and number as the conifers thin and shrink. Presently the trees bend eastward, permanently misshaped by the icy winter blasts. Presently they curve in semicircles or rise bravely in the lee of some great rock to bend at right angles from its top. Here and there are full grown trees growing prostrate, like a rug upon the ground. Close to the summit trees shrink to the size of shrubs, but some of these have heavy trunks a few feet high and doubtless have attained their fullness of development. Gradually they thin and disappear, giving place to wiry, powerful, deciduous shrubs and these in turn to gross still smaller. There are forests of willows just above Rocky Mountains Timberline, two or three inches tall, and many acres in extent. From the front range, well in the south of the park, a spur of tooth granite peaks springs two miles eastward to the monarch of the park, Longs Peak. It is this position in advance of the range as much as the advantage of its 14,255 feet of altitude which enables this famous mountain to become the climax of every east side view. Longs Peak has a remarkable personality. It is an architectural creation, a solid granite temple, strongly buttressed upon four sides. From every point of view it is profoundly different, but always consistent and recognizable. Seen from the east it is supported on either side by mountains of majesty. Joined with it on the north, Mount Lady Washington rises 13,269 feet, the cleft between their summits being the way of the trail to Longs Peak summit. Merging with it in mass upon the south, Mount Meeker rises 13,911 feet. Once the three were one monster mountain, frosts and rains carried off the crust strata, bared the granite core, and chipped it into three summits, while a glacier of large size gouged out of its middle the abyss which divides the mountains, and carved the precipice which drops 2400 feet from Longs Peak summit to Khasm Lake. The Khasm which is easily reached by trail from the hotels at the mountain's foot is one of the wildest places in America. It may be explored in a day. Mountain climbing is becoming the fashion in Rocky Mountain National Park. Among those who never climbed before, and it will not be many years before its inmost recesses are penetrated by innumerable trampers and campers. The stunt of the park is the ascent of Longs Peak. This is no particular matter for the experienced, for the trail is well worn and the ascent may be made on horseback to the boulder field, less than 2000 feet from the summit. But to the inexperienced it appears an undertaking of first magnitude. From the boulder field the trail carries out upon a long sharp slant which drops into the precipice of Glacier Gorge and ascends the box-like summit cap by a shelf trail which sometimes has terrors for the unaccustomed. Several hundred persons make the ascent each summer without accident, including many women and a few children. The one risk is that accidental snow obscure the trail, but Longs Peak is not often ascended without a guide. The view from the summit of the entire national park, of the splendid range south which should be in the park but is not, of the foothills and pond-spotted plains in the east, of Denver and her mountain background, and of the Medicine Bow and other ranges west of the park, is one of the country's great spectacles. Longs Peak is sometimes climbed at night for the sunrise. The six miles of range between Longs Peak and the southern boundary of the park show five towering, snow-spotted mountains of noble beauty, Mount Alice, Mahana Peak, Mahanya Peak, Usel Peak, and Mount Copeland. Tributary to the wild basin which corresponds south of Longs Peak to the wild gardens north of it are gorgeous of loveliness the waters of whose exquisite lakes swell Saint Rain 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. The Rockies are a masterpiece of erosion. When forces below the surface began to push them high in the air, their granite cores were covered thousands of feet deep with the sediments of the Great Sea, of whose bottom once they were apart. The higher they rose, the more insistently frosts and rains concentrated upon their uplifting summits. In time all sedimentary rock 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 today. The glaciers molded 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 today will decline a million years or more from now into the low rounded summits of our eastern appellations 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 flat top trail for instance and notice particularly the broad rolling level of the continental divide. For many miles it is nothing but a lofty bare and 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 peniplane, which means nearly a plain. It is from fragmentary remains of peniplanes that they trace ranges long ages washed away. History may, in some dim future age, repeat still another wonder, for upon the flat and 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 today. Frost 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 them 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 Iceburg 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 full 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 surface visitors of today will find cakes of floating ice, broken from the sloping snow field which is the old glacier's remainder and representative of today. 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 hallowed Locke Vale, one upon the north which molded Glacier Gorge, and the small but powerful Glacier which hallowed the great chasm on the east front of Longs Peak. The Locke Vale and Glacier Gorge glaciers joined with giant ice streams as far north as Tyndall Gorge to form the Bartolf Glacier, and north of that, the mighty Thompson Glacier drained the divide to the head of Forest Canyon, while the full River Glacier drained the mummy range south of Hague's 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 in size, 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 unequaled, in my observation, for number, size, and storytelling 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 Long's Peak and encircles the eastern foot of Mount Meeker. 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 unraveling 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. 6. The limitations of a chapter permit no mention of the gigantic, prehistoric monsters of land, sea, and air which once haunted the sight 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 Dr. 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 Long's Peak in honor of their leader. Parkmen record 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 Gym, arrived in 1868. Others followed slowly. William N. Byers, founder of the Rocky Mountain News, made the first attempt to climb Long's 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 Long's 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 now 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. 50,000 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. End of Part 7. Part 8 of the Book of the National Parks. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Sterling Yard, 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 Tidewater 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 northwesternly and southwesternly limbs of the system, is the gigantic Alaska range, which is higher and broader than the Sierra Nevada, and have greater relief in extent than the Alps. Near the center of this range, its climax and position, height, bulk, and majesty, stands Mount McKinley. Its glistening peak can be seen on clear days in most directions for 200 miles. For many years, Mount St. Elias, with its 18,000 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 Dolike, and tell you that it is the rock which it god threw at his eloping wife. They say it was once a volcano, which is not the fact. The elutes on the south call it Treliica, the big mountain. The natives of the Cascokam country on the west knew it as Denale, the god, father of the great range. The Russians who established the first permanent white settlement in Alaska on Kodiak Island knew it as Bushia 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 was little mention of it for some years. But Frank Densmore, an explorer of 1889, entered the Cascokam 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, USA, 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 Goldfields 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 mountains 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 Brown, 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 traveling 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 Elridge-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 headwars of the Nanana 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 unequaled, that Congress set aside twenty-two hundred square miles under the name of Mount McKinley National Park. From the white sides of Mount 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 Cuscoquem into the 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 traveler 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 a butt upon great sweeping glaciers. Low as it is, the plateau is generally above Timberline. 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 gripped 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 appalled. Along the northern edge of the park lies the Kentishna 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 Brown 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 Bellmore Brown'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 Mount McKinley. It failed through his underestimation of the extensive equipment necessary. In 1906 Dr. 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. Bellmore Brown, artist, explorer, and big-game hunter. Ascending the Yentina River, it reached a point up the Tocos Sitna Glacier beyond which progress was impossible and returned to Cook Inlet and disbanded. Parker returned to New York and Cook proposed that Brown should lay in a needed supply of game, while he, with a packer named Barrel, should make what he described as a rapid reconnaissance preparatory to a further attempt upon the summit the following year. Brown wanted to accompany him, but was over persuaded. Cook and Barrel then ascended the Sitna, 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 Barrel 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 Brown 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 Barrel four years before. This crag was found a mile 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 south side, but was stopped by gigantic snow walls which defeated every attempt to cross. At the slightest touch of the sun writes Brown, the great cliffs literally smoke with avalanches. The Parker Brown expedition undertaken in 1912 for purposes of exploration also approached from the south, but following the Sitna 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 Brown, 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 someone would gaze fondly at the surrounding mountains and ejaculate. This is sure a white man's country. Without these happy hunting grounds, as Brown chapters the park country in his book, Stephen R. Caps 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 tarmogen are at times remarkably numerous." After and Brown camped along the Muldrow Glacier, now a magnificent central feature of the park, then they made for McKinley Summit. Striking the Denali Glacier, they ascended it with a dog train to an altitude of eleven thousand feet where they made a base camp and went on a foot, packing provisions and camp outfit on their backs. At one place they ascended an incoming glacier over ice cascades four thousand feet high. From their last camp they cut steps in the ice for more than three thousand feet of final ascent and attained the top on July 1st in the face of a blizzard. On the northeastern end of the level summit and only five minutes walk from the little hillock which forms the supreme summit, the blizzard completely blinded them. It was impossible to go on and to wait meant rapid death by freezing. With extreme difficulty they returned to their camp. Two days later they made a second attempt but were again enveloped in an ice storm that rendered progress impossible. Exhaustion of supplies forbade another try and saved their lives. For a few days later a violent earthquake shook McKinley to its summit. Later on Mr. Brown identified this earthquake as concurrent with the terrific explosive eruption which blew off the top of Mt. Katmay on the south coast of Alaska. The following spring the stuck Carstens Party made the summit upon that rarest of occasions with Mt. McKinley, a perfect day. Archdeacon Stuck describes the actual summit as a little crater like snow basin sixty or sixty-five feet long and twenty to twenty-five feet wide with a haycock of snow at either end. The south one a little higher than the north. Ignoring official and recognized nomenclature and calling McKinley and Foraker by their Cascakwam Indian names he writes of Mt. Foraker. The Nally's wife does not appear at all from the actual summit of the Nally for she is completely hidden by his south peak until the moment when his south peak is surmounted and never was nobler site displayed to man than that great isolated mountain spread out completely with all its spurs and ridges, its cliffs and its glaciers lofty and mighty and yet far beneath us. Above us he writes a few pages later the sky took on a blue so deep that none of us had ever gazed upon a midday sky like it before. It was deep, rich, lustrous, transparent blue, as dark as Prussian blue, but intensely blue, a hue so strange, so increasingly impressive, that to one at least it seemed like special news of God as a new poet sings. We first noticed the darkening tint of the upper sky in the grand basin and it deepened as we rose. Tindall observed and discussed this phenomenon in the Alps, but it seemed scarcely to have been mentioned since. A couple of months before the Parker-Brown Party started for the top, there was an ascent of the lower north peak which, for sheer daring and endurance, must rank high in the history of adventure. Four prospectors and miners from the Kentishna region organized by Tom Lloyd took advantage of the hard ice of May and an idle dog team to make for the summit. Their motive seems to have been little more than to plant a pole where it could be seen by telescope, as they thought from Fairbanks. That was why they chose the north peak. They used no ropes, alpine stalks, or scientific equipment of any sort and carried only one camera, the chance possession, of McGonagall. They made their last camp at an altitude of eleven thousand feet. Here Lloyd remained, while Anderson, Taylor, and McGonagall attempted the summit in one day's supreme effort. Near the top McGonagall was overcome by mountain sickness. Anderson and Taylor went on and planted their pole near the north summit, where the stuck Carstens Party saw it a year later in their ascent of the south peak. So extraordinary a feat of strength and endurance will hardly be accomplished again, unless perhaps by hardy miners of arctic wilderness. The north pole is nothing to fellows like us, one of them said later on, one strike gold there and will build a town on it in a month. The published records of the Parker Brown and Stuck Carstens expeditions emphasized the laborious nature of the climbing. The very isolation, which gives McKinley its spectacular elevation, multiplies the difficulties of ascent by lowering the snowline thousands of feet below the snowline of the Himalayas and Andes with their loftier surrounding valleys. Travel on the glaciers was trying in the extreme, for much of the way had to be sounded for hidden crevasses, and after the selection of each new camping-place, the extensive outfit must be returned for and sledded or carried up. Frequent barriers, often of great height, had to be surmounted by torturous and exhausting detours over icy cliffs and soft snow, and always special care must be taken against avalanches. The roar of avalanches for much of the latter journey was almost continuous. Near the end the thermometer was rarely above zero and at night far below, but the heat inglare of the sun was stifling and blinding during much of the day, often they perspired profusely under their crushing burdens, with the thermometer nearly at zero. Snow fell daily, and often several times a day. It is probable that no other of the world's mountain giants presents climbing conditions so strenuous. Farming is successfully carried on in the Himalayas, far above McKinley's level of perpetual snow, and Tucker reports having climbed a 20,000 foot peak in the Andes with less exertion than it cost the Parker Brown Party, of which he had been a member, to mount the first 4,500 feet of McKinley. While McKinley will be climbed again and again in the future, the feet will scarcely be one of the popular amusements of the National Park. Yet Mount McKinley is the northern landmark of an immense unexplored mountain region south of the National Park, which very far surpasses the Alps in every feature that has made the Alps world famous. Of this region, A. H. Brooks, Chief of the Alaska Division of the United States Geological Survey writes, Here lies a rugged highland area, far greater in extent than all of Switzerland, a virgin field for explorers and mountaineers. He who would master unattain summits, explore unknown rivers, or traverse untrodden glaciers, in a region whose scenic beauties are hardly equaled, has not to seek them in South America or Central Asia, for generations will pass before the possibilities of the Alaska Range are exhausted. But this is not Switzerland, with its hotels, railways, train guides, and well-worn paths. It will appeal only to him who prefers to strike out for himself, who can break his own trail through trackless wilds, can throw the diamond hitch, and will take the chances of life and limb so dear to the heart of the true explorer. The hotels will come in time to the Mount McKinley National Park, and perhaps they will come also to the Alaskan Alps. Perhaps it is not straining the credulity of an age like ours to suggest that McKinley's commanding summit may be attained some day by airplane, with many of the joys and none of the distressing hardships endured by the weary climber. When this time comes, if it does come, there will be added merely another extraordinary experience to the very many unique and pleasurable experiences of a visit to the Mount McKinley National Park. End of Part 8. Part 9 of the Book of the National Parks. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Sterling Yard. Lafayette and the East. Lafayette National Park, Maine. Area, ten thousand acres. It has been the policy of Congress to create National Parks only from public lands, the title to which costs nothing to acquire. It may be many years before the nation awakes to the fact that areas distinguished for supreme scenery, historical association, or extraordinary scientific significance are worth conserving even if conservation involves their purchase. The answer to the oft-asked question why the National Parks are all in the West is that the East passed into private possession before the National Park idea assumed importance in the national consciousness. The existence of the two National Parks east of the Rocky Mountains merely emphasizes the fact. The hot springs of Arkansas were set apart in 1832 while the Ozark Mountains were still a wilderness. The Lafayette National Park in Maine is made up of many small parcels of privately owned land which a group of public spirited citizens because of the impossibility of securing national appropriations patiently acquired during a series of laborious years and presented in 1916 to the people of the United States. While refusing to purchase land for national parks, Congress nevertheless is buying large areas of eastern mountain land for national forest, the purpose being not only to conserve water sources which national parks would accomplish quite as thoroughly but particularly to control lumbering operations in accord with principles which will ensure the lumber supply of the future. Here and there in this reserve are limited areas of distinguished national park quality but whether they will be set aside as national parks is a question for the people and the future to decide. Certainly the mountain topography and the rich deciduous forests of the eastern United States should be represented in the national park system by several fine examples. The Lafayette National Park differs from all other members of the national park system in several important respects. It is in the Far East. It combines seashore and mountain. It is clothed with a rich and varied growth of deciduous trees and eastern conifers. It is intimately associated with the very early history of America besides which it is a region of noble beauty, subtle charm, and fascinating variety. The Appalachian mountain uplift, which roughly speaking embraces all the ranges constituting the eastern rib of the continent, may be considered to include also the very ancient peniplanes of New England. These tumbled hills and shallow valleys, accented here and there by ranges and monad knocks, by which the geologists means solitary peaks, are all that the frost and rains of many millions of years and the glaciers of more recent geologic times have left of what once must have been a towering mountain region crested in snow. The wrinkling of the Earth's surface, which produced this range, occurred during the Devonian period when fishes were the predominant inhabitants of the Earth, many millions of years before birds or even reptiles appeared. Its rise was accompanied by volcanic disturbances whose evidences are abundant on islands between the mouth of the Penobscot and Mount Desert Island, though not within the park. The mine cannot conceive the lapse of time which has reduced this range at an erosional speed no greater than today's to its present level. During this process the coastline was also slowly sinking, changing valleys into estuaries and land in circle bays. The coast of Maine is an eloquent chapter in the continent's ancient history and the Lafayette National Park is one of the most dramatic paragraphs in the chapter. Where the Penobscot River reaches the sea and for forty miles east the sinking continental shore has deeply indented the coastline with a network of broad twisting bays, enclosing many islands. The largest and finest of these is Mount Desert Island for many years celebrated for its romantic beauty. Upon its northeast shore facing Frenchman's Bay is the resort town of Bar Harbor, other resorts dotted shores on every side. The island has a large summer population drawn from all parts of the country. Besides its hotels there are many fine summer homes. The feature which especially distinguishes Mount Desert Island from other islands, in fact from the entire Atlantic coast, is a group of granitic mountains which rise abruptly from the sea. They were once towering monsters, perhaps only one and questionably the loftiest for many miles around. They are the sole remainders upon the present coastline of a great former range. They are composed almost wholly of granite, worn down by the ages, but massive enough still to resist the agencies which wiped away their comrades. They rise a thousand feet or more, grim, rounded, cleft with winding valleys and deep passes, divided in places by estuaries of the sea, holding in their hollows many charming lakes. There abrupt flanks gnawed by the beating sea, their valleys grown with splendid forest and brightened by wildflowers, their slopes and domes sprinkled with conifers which struggle for foothold in the cracks which the elements are widening and deepening in their granite surface. For years they have been the resort of thousands of climbers, students of nature and seekers of the beautiful. The views of the sea, estuary, island, plain, lake and mountain from the heights have no counterpart elsewhere. All this mountain wilderness, free as it was to the public, was in private ownership. Some of it was held by persons who had not seen it for years. Some of it was locked up in estates. The time came when owners began to plan fine summer homes high on the mountain slopes. A few, however, believed that the region should belong to the whole people and out of this belief grew the movement led by George B. Doerr and Charles W. Elliott to acquire title and present it to the nation which would not buy it. They organized a holding association to which they gave their own properties. For years afterwards Mr. Doerr devoted most of his time to persuading others to contribute their holdings and to raising subscriptions for the purchase of plots which were tied up in estates. In 1916 the association presented 5,000 acres to the government and President Wilson created it by proclamation the Sur-de-Mont National Monument. The gift has been greatly increased since. In 1918 Congress made appropriations for its upkeep and development. In February 1919 Congress changed its name and status. It then became the Lafayette National Park. The impulse to name the new National Park after the French General, who came to our aid in time of need, arose of course out of the wartime warmth of feeling for our ally France. The region had been identified with early French exploration. The original monument had been named in commemoration of this historical association. The first European settlement in America, north of the latitude of the Gulf of Mexico, was here. Henri of Navarre had sent two famous adventurers to the new world, De Montt and Champlain. The first colony established by De Montt was at the mouth of the St. Croix River, which forms the eastern boundary of Maine, and the first land within the present United States which was reached by Champlain was Mount Desert Island. This was in 1604. It was Champlain who gave the island its present name, after the mountains which rise so prominently from its rock-bound shore. To him, however, the name had a different significance than it first suggests to us. L'Ire de Montt-des-Air meant to him the island of the Lonely Mountains, and lonely indeed they must have seemed above the flat shoreline. Thus named, the place became a landmark for future voyagers. Among others, Winthrop record seeing the mountains on his way to the Massachusetts Colony in 1630. He anchored opposite and fish for two hours, catching sixty-seven great cod, one of which was a yard around. By a curious train of circumstances, writes George B. Dorr, the titles by which these mountains to the eastward of Somme Sound are held go back to the early ownership of Mount Desert Island by the Crown of France, for it was granted by Louis XIV, grandson of Henry IV, to Antoine de la Molte Cadillac, an officer of noble family from southwestern France, then serving in Acadia, who afterward became successively the founder of Detroit and the governor of Louisiana, the Mississippi Valley. Cadillac lost it later, through English occupation of the region, ownership passing first of the province, then to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But presently the Commonwealth gave back to his granddaughter, Madame de Grigore, and her husband, French refugees, the island's eastern half, moved there too by the part that France had taken in the recent War of Independence and by letters they had brought from Lafayette, and they came down and lived there. And so it naturally followed that, under stress of war enthusiasm, this reservation with its French associations should commemorate not only the old province of Acadia, which the French yielded to England only after a half a century of war, and England later on to us after another war, but the great war also in which France, England, and the United States all joined as allies in the cause of the world's freedom. In accord with this idea, the highest mountain looking upon the sea has been named the Flying Squadron in honor of the service of the air, born of an American invention, and carried to perfection by three allies in common. The park may be entered from any of the surrounding resorts, but the main gateway is Bar Harbor, which is reached by train, automobile, and steamboat. No resort may be reached more comfortably, and hotel accommodations are ample. The mountains rise within a mile of the town. They extend westward for 12 miles, lying in two groups, separated by a fine saltwater fjord known as Somes Sound. The park's boundary is exceedingly irregular, with deep indentations of private property. It is enclosed along the shore by an excellent automobile road. Roads also cross it on both sides of Somes Sound. There are 10 mountains in the Eastern Group. The three fronting Bar Harbor have been renamed for historic reasons, Cadillac Mountain, the Flying Squadron, and Champlain Mountain. For the same reason, mountains upon Somes Sound have been renamed Acadia Mountain, Saint-Soviet Mountain, and Norambega Mountain, the last in Indian name. Similar changes commemorating the early English occupation also have been made in the nomenclature of the Western Group. Cablets and memorials are also projected in emphasis of the historical associations of the place. Both mountain groups are dotted with lakes. Those of the Western Group are the largest of the island. The pleasures then of the Lafayette National Park cover a wide range of human desire. Sea bathing, boating, yachting, saltwater and freshwater fishing, tramping, exploring the wilderness, hunting the view spots. These are the summer occupations of many visitors. The diversions of many others. The more thoughtful will find its historical associations fascinating. It's geological record one of the richest in the continent. It's far as well-equipped schools for tree study, their branches and museum of bird life. To climb these low mountains, wandering by the hour in their hollows and upon their sea horizon shoulders, is for one interested in nature to get very close indeed to the secrets of her wonderful East. One may stand upon Cadillacs round its summit and let imagination realize for him the day when this was a glaciered peak in a mighty range, which forged southward from the far north shoulder upon shoulder, peak upon peak, pushing ever higher as it approached the sea and extending far beyond the present ocean horizon, for these mountains of Mount Desert are by no means the terminal of the original mighty range. The slow subsidence of the coast has wholly submerged several, perhaps many, that once rose south of them. The valley which now carries the St. Croix River drained this once towering range's eastern slopes. The valley of the Penobscot drained its western slopes. The rocks beneath his feet disclose not only this vision of the geologic past, besides that in their slow decay, in the chiseling of the trickling waters, in the cleavage of masses by winter's ice, in the peeling of the surface by alternate freezing and melting, in the dissolution and disintegration everywhere by the chemicals imprisoned in air and water, all of which he sees beneath his feet, they disclose to him the processes by which nature has wrought this splendid ruin. And if, captivated by this vision, he studies intimately the page of history written in these rocks, he will find it full of fascinating detail. The region also offers an absorbing introduction to the study of our eastern flora. The exposed bogs and headlands support several hundred species of plants, typical of the arctic, sub-arctic and Hudsonian zones, together with practically all of the common plants of the Canadian zone, and many of the southern coasts. So with the trees, essentially coastal, it is the land of conifers, the southern limit of some which are common in the great regions of the north, yet exhibiting in nearly full variety the species for many miles south, yet it is also, in its sheltered valleys, remarkably representative of the deciduous growths of the entire Appalachian region. The bird life is full and varied, the food supply attracts migratory birds, and aquatic birds find here the conditions which make for increase. Deer are returning in some numbers from the mainland. In brief, the Lafayette National Park, small though it is, is one of the most important members of the National Park system. For the pleasure seeker, no other provides so wide and varied an opportunity. To the student, no other offers a more readable or more distinctive volume. It is the only national museum of the fascinating geology of the east. And I can think of no other place in the east where classes can find so varied and so significant an exhibit. To the artist, the poet, and the dreamer, it presents vistas of ocean, inlet, fjord, shore, waveless promontory, bog, meadow, forest, and mountain. An answer to every mood. If this nation, as now appears, must long lack national parks representative of the range of its splendid east, let us be thankful that this one small park is so complete and so distinguished. End of Part 9. Part 10 of the Book of the National Parks. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Sterling Yard on the volcano in scenery. The volcanic national parks are Lassen Volcanic, Crater Lake, Mount Rainier, Yellowstone, and Hawaii. Though several of them exhibit extremely high mountains, their scenic ensemble differs in almost all respects from that of the granite parks. The landscape tends to be broad elevated surfaces and rolling hills from which rise sharp towering cones or massive mountains whose irregular bulging knobs were formed by outbreaks of lava upon the size of original central vents. The Cascade Mountains in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California are one of the best examples of such a landscape. From its low swelling summits rise at intervals, the powerful master cones of Shasta, Rainier, Adams, Hood, Baker, and others. Fujiyama, the celebrated mountain of Japan, may be cited as a familiar example of the basic mountain form, the Single Cone Volcanic Peak. Vesuvius is a familiar example of simple complication, the Double Cone Volcano, while Manaloa and Hawaii, including Kilauea of the Ring of Fire, a neighbor volcano which it has almost engulfed in its swollen bulk, well illustrates the volcano built up by outpouring of lava from vents broken through its sides. Flat and rolling Yellowstone with its geyser fields is one of the best possible examples of a dead and much eroded volcanic region. The scenic detail of the volcanic landscape is interesting and different from any other. Centuries and the elements create from lava a soil of great fertility. No forests and wildflowers excel, those growing on the lavas of the Cascades and the fertility of the Hawaiian Islands, which are entirely volcanic, is world famous. Streams cut deep and often highly colored canyons in these broad lava lands, and wind and rain while eroding valleys often leave ornately modeled edifices of harder rock and tall thin needles pointing to the zenith. In the near neighborhood of the volcanoes, as well as on their sloping sides, are found lava formations of many strange and wonderful kinds, hot springs and bubbling paint pots abound, and in the Yellowstone National Park geysers. Fields of fantastic twisted shapes, masses suggesting heaps of tumbled ropes, upstanding spatter cones, caves arched with lava roofs, are a very few of the very many phenomena which the climber of a volcano encounters on his way. And at the top, broad, bowl-shaped craters whose walls are sometimes many hundred feet deep enclose if the crater has long been dormant, sandy floors from which perhaps small cinder cones arise. If the crater is still active, the adventurer's experiences are limited only by his daring. The entire region in short strikingly differs from any other of scenic kind. Of the several processes of world-making, all of which are progressing today at normal speed, none is so thrilling as volcanism, because no other concentrates action into terms of human grasp. Last since peak eruption of a thousand cubic yards of lava in a few hours thrills us more than the Mississippi's erosion of an average foot of her vast valley in a hundred thousand years, yet the latter is enormously the greater. The explosion of Mount Katmay, the rise and fall of Kilauea's boiling lava, the playing of Yellowstone's monster geysers, the spectacle of Mozama's lake-filled crater, the steaming of the Cascades' myriad bubbling springs, all make strong appeal to the imagination. They carry home the realization of mysterious, overwhelming power. Lava is molten rock of excessively high temperature, which suddenly becomes released from the fearful pressures of Earth's interior. Hurled from volcanic vents or gushing from cracks in the Earth's skin, it spreads rapidly over large neighborhoods, filling valleys, and raising bulky, rounded masses. Often it is soft and frothy like pumice. Even in its frequent glass forms, obsidian, for example, it easily disintegrates. There are as many kinds of lava as there are kinds of rock from which it is formed. Volcanic scenery is by no means confined to what we call the volcanic national parks. Volcanoes are frequent in many parts of the continent. We meet their remnants unexpectedly among the granites of the Rockies and the Sierra, and the sedimentary rocks of the West and the Southwest. Several of our national parks, besides those prevailingly volcanic, and several of our most distinguished national monuments, exhibit interesting volcanic interludes.