 Part 16 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. Yellowstone, a volcanic interlude, continued. 3. So interesting are the geysers and their kin that, with their splendid wilderness setting, other glories seem superfluous. I have had my moments of impatience with the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, for being in the Yellowstone. Together the canyon and the geysers are almost too much for one place, even perhaps for one visit. One can only hold so much, even of beauty, at once. Spectacles of this quality and quantity need assimilation, and assimilation requires time. Nevertheless, once enter into sympathetic relations with the canyon, once find its heart in penetrated secret and the tables are quickly turned. Strangely, it now becomes quite easy to view with comparative coolness the claims of mere hot water wonders. The canyon cannot be considered apart from its river, any more than a geyser apart from its environment of hot spring and basin, and any consideration of the Yellowstone River begins with its lake. As compared with others of scenic celebrity, Yellowstone Lake is unremarkable. Its shores are so low, and the mountains of its southern border so flat and unsuggestive, that it curiously gives the impression of surface altitude. Curiously, because it actually has the altitude, its surface is more than 7,700 feet above tide. If I have the advertisement right, it is the highest water in the world that floats a line of steamboats. The lake is large, twenty miles north and south by fifteen miles east and west. It is irregular with deep indentations. It is heavily wooded to the water's edge. All its entering streams are small except the Yellowstone River, which from its source in the Apsarokas just south of the park boundary, enters the southeast arm through the lowland wilderness home of the Moose and the Wild Buffalo. The lake is the popular resort of thousands of large white pelicans, its most picturesque feature. That part of the Yellowstone River, which interests us, emerges from the lake at its most northerly point. It is here a broad, swift stream of some depth and great clarity, so swarming with trout that half a dozen or more usually may be seen upon its bottom at any glance from boat or bridge. A number of boats usually are anchored above the bridge, from which anglers are successfully trailing artificial flies and spinners in the fast current. And the bridge is usually lined with anglers who, in spite of crude outfits, frequently hook good trout, which they pull up by main strength, much as the phlegmatic patrons of excursion steamers to the banks, yank flopping cod from brine to basket on the top deck. The last time I crossed the fishing bridge and paused to see the fun, a woman whose face beamed with happiness held up a twenty inch trout and said, Just look, my husband caught this and he is seventy-six years old, last month. It's the first fish he ever caught, for he was brought up in Kansas, you know, where there isn't any fishing. My, but he's a proud man. We're going to get the camp to cook it for us. He's gone now to look for a board to draw its measurement to show the folks at home. From here to the river's emergence from the park, the fishing is not crude. In fact, it taxes the most skillful anglers' art to steer his fighting trout through boiling rapids to the net. For very soon, the Yellowstone narrows and pitches down sharper slants to the climax of the falls and the mighty canyon. This intermediate stretch of river is beautiful in its quietude. The forests often touch the water's edge, and ever it narrows and deepens and splashes higher against the rocks which stem its current. Forever it is steepening to the plunge. Above the upper fall, it pinches to almost a mill race, roars over low sills, swings eastward at right angles, and plunges a hundred and nine feet. I know of no cataract which expresses might in action so eloquently as the upper fall of the Yellowstone. Pressed as it is within narrow bounds, it seems to gush with other motive power than mere gravity. Seen from above looking down, seen sideways from below, or looked at straight on from the campsite on the opposite rim, the water appears hurled from the brink. Less than a mile south of the upper fall, the river again falls, this time into the Grand Canyon. Imposing as the great fall is, it must chiefly be considered as a part of the Grand Canyon picture. The only separate view of it looks up from the river's edge in front, a view which few get because of the difficult climb. Every other view poses it merely as an element in the canyon composition. Compared with the upper fall, its more than double height gives it the great superiority of majesty without detracting from the upper fall's gushing personality. In fact, it is the king of falls. Comparison with the Yosemite's falls is impossible, so different of the elements and conditions. The great fall of the Yellowstone carries in one body perhaps a greater bulk of water than all the Yosemite Valley's falls combined. And so we come to the canyon. In figures it is roughly a thousand feet deep and twice as wide, more or less at the rim. The supremely scenic part reaches perhaps three miles below the great fall. Several rock points extend far into the canyon, from which the gorgeous spectacle may be viewed as from an aeroplane. Artist's point, which is reached from the east side, displays the great fall as the center of a noble composition. It was Moran's choice. Inspiration point, which juts in far from the west side, shows a deeper and more comprehensive view of the canyon and only a glimpse of the great fall. Both views are essential to any adequate conception. From artist's point, the eye loses detail in the overmastering glory of the whole. From inspiration point, the canyon reveals itself in all the intimacy of its sublime form and color. Both views dazzle and astonish. Neither can be looked at very long at one time. It will help comprehension of the picture quality of this remarkable canyon to recall that it is carved out of the products of volcanism. Its promontories and pinnacles are the knobbed and gnarled decomposition products of lava rocks left following erosion. Its sides are gashed and fluted lava cliffs flanked by long straight slopes of coarse volcanic sand-like grains. Its colors have the distinctness and occasional luridness which seem natural to fused and oxidized disintegrations. Geologically speaking, it is a young canyon. It is digging deeper all the time. Yellow, of course, is the prevailing color. Moran was right. His was the general point of view. His messaged the dramatic ensemble. But even from artist's point, closer looking reveals great masses of reds and grays, while inspiration point discloses a gorgeous palette dobbed with most of the colors and intermediate tints that imagination can suggest. I doubt whether there is another such kaleidoscope in nature. There is apparently every gray from purist white to dull black, every yellow from lemon to deep orange, every red, pink, and brown. These tints dye the rocks and sands in splashes and long transverse streaks, which merge into a single joyous exclamation in vivid color whose red and yellow accents have something of the oriental. Greens and blues are missing from the dyes, but are otherwise supplied. The canyon is edged with lodgepole forests, and gross of lighter greens invade the sandy slants, at times nearly to the frothing river, and the river is a chain of emeralds and pearls. Blue completes the color gamut from the inverted bowl of sky. No sketch of the canyon is complete without the story of the great robbery. I am not referring to the several hold-ups of the old stagecoach days, but to a robbery which occurred long before the coming of man, the theft of the waters of Yellowstone Lake. For this splendid river, these noble falls, this incomparable canyon, are the ill-gotten products of the first of Yellowstone's hold-ups. Originally Yellowstone Lake was 160 feet higher and very much larger than it is today. It extended from the headwaters of the present Yellowstone River, far in the south, northward past the present Great Fall and Inspiration Point. It included a large part of what is now known as the Hayden Valley. At that time the Continental Divide, which now cuts the southwest corner of the park, encircled the lake on its north, and just across the low divide, was a small flat-lying stream which drained and still drains the volcanic slopes leading down from Dunraven Peak and Mount Washburn. This small stream, known as Sulphur Creek, has the honor, or the dishonor if you choose, of being the first desperado of the Yellowstone, but one so much greater than its two petty imitators of human times that there is no comparison of misdeeds. Sulphur Creek stole the lake from the Snake River and used it to create the Yellowstone River, which in turn created the wonderful canyon. Here at last is a crime in which all will agree that the end justified the means. How this piracy was accomplished is written on the rocks. Even the former lake outlet into the Snake River is plainly discernible today. At the lake's north end, where the seeping waters of Sulphur Creek and the edge of the lake nearly met on opposite sides of what was then the low flat divide, it only required some slight disturbance indirectly volcanic, some unaccustomed rising of lake levels, perhaps merely some special stress of flood or storm, to make the connection. Perhaps the creek itself, sapping back in the soft lava soils, unaided, found the lake. Connection once made, the mighty body of lake water speedily deepened to channel northward, and Sulphur Creek became sure of its posterity. At that time, hidden under the lake's surface, two real light dykes, or upright walls of harder rock, extended crosswise through the lake more than half a mile apart. As the lake level fell, the nearer of these dykes emerged and divided the waters into two lakes, the upper of which emptied over the dyke into the lower. This was the beginning of the Great Fall, and presently, as the Great Fall cut its breach deeper and deeper into the restraining dyke, it lowered the upper lake level, until presently the other real light dyke emerged from the surface, carrying another cataract, and thus began the upper fall. Meantime the stream below kept digging deeper the canyon of Sulphur Creek, and there came a time when the lower lake drained wholly away. In its place was left a bottom land, which is now a part of the Hayden Valley, and running through it a river. Forthwith this river began scooping, from the Great Fall to Inspiration Point, the scenic ditch which is world celebrated today, as the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Four. Now imagine this whole superlative wilderness heavily populated with wild animals in a state of normal living. Imagine 30,000 elk, for instance, roaming about in bands of half a dozen to half a thousand. Imagine them, not friendly perhaps, but fearless, with that entire indifference which most animals show to creatures which neither help nor harm them. As indifferent say, as the rabbits in your pasture or the squirrels in your oak woods, imagine all the wild animals, except the sneaking predatory kind, proportionately plentiful and similarly fearless. Bear, antelope, mountain sheep, deer, bison, even moose in the fastnesses, to say nothing of the innumerable smaller beasts. There has been no hunting of harmless animals in the Yellowstone since 1894, and this is one result. It is true that comparatively few visitors see many animals, but that is the fault of their haste or their temperament or their inexperience of nature. One must seek in sympathy to find. Tearing over the wilderness roads in noisy motors smelling of gasoline is not the best way to find them, although the elk and deer became indifferent to automobiles as soon as they discovered them harmless. One may see them not infrequently from automobiles and often from horse-drawn wagons, and one may see them often and intimately who walks or rides horseback on the trails. The admission of the automobile to Yellowstone roads changed seeing conditions materially. In five days of quiet driving in 1914, with Colonel L. M. Brett, then Superintendent of the Park, in a direction opposite to the stages, I saw more animals from my wagon seat than I had expected to see wild in all my life. We saw a bear half a dozen times, elk in numbers, black-tailed and white-tailed deer so frequently that count was lost the second morning, four bands of antelope, buffalo, foxes, coyotes, and even a bull moose. Once we stopped so as not to hurry a large bear and two cubs which were leisurely crossing the road. Deer watched us pass within a hundred yards, elk grazed at close quarters, and our one bull moose obligingly ambled ahead of us along the road. There was never fear, never excitement, except my own, not even haste, even the accustomed horses, no more than cocked an ear or two, while waiting for three wild bears to get out of the middle of the road. Of course, scenic completeness is enough in itself to justify the existence of these animals in the marvelous wilderness of the Yellowstone. Their presence in normal abundance and their calm at home-ness perfects nature's spectacle. In this respect also, Yellowstone's unique place among the national parks is secure. The lessons of the Yellowstone are plain. It is now too late to restore elsewhere the great natural possession which the thoughtless savagery of a former generation destroyed and careless-ruth. But thanks to this early impulse of conservation, a fine example still remains in the Yellowstone. But it is not too late to obliterate wholly certain misconceptions by which that savagery was then justified. It is not too late to look upon wild animals as fellow-heritors of the earth, possessing certain natural rights which men are glad rather than bound to respect. It is not too late to consider them with birds and forests, lakes, rivers, seas, and skies a part of nature's glorious gift for man's manifold satisfaction, a gift to carefully conserve for the study and enjoyment of today and to develop for the uses of larger and more appreciative generations to come. Of course, if this be brought to universal accomplishment, and the impulse has been advancing fast of late, it must be Yellowstone's part to furnish the exhibit, for we have no other. To many the most surprising part of Yellowstone's wild animal message is man's immunity from hatred and harm by predatory beasts. To know that wild bears, if kindly treated, are not only harmless but friendly, that grizzlies will not attack except in self-defense, and that wolves, wild cats, and mountain lions fly with that instinctive dread which is man's dependable protection, may destroy certain romantic illusions of youth, and discredit the observation, if not the conscious verity, of many an honest hunter. But it imparts a modern scientific fact which sets the whole wild animal question in a new light. In every case of assault by bears, where complete evidence has been obtainable, the United States Biological Survey, after fullest investigation, has exonerated the bear. He has always been attacked, or has had reason to believe himself attacked. In more than thirty summers of fieldwork, Vernon Bailey, Chief Field Naturalist of the Biological Survey, has slept on the ground without fires or other protection, and frequently in the morning found tracks of investigating predatory beasts. There are reports but no records of human beings killed by wolves or mountain lions in America, yet for years all reports susceptible of proof have been officially investigated. One of Yellowstone's several manifest destinies is to become the well-patronized American School of Wildlife Study. Already, from its abundance, it is supplying wild animals to help in the long and difficult task of restoring here and there to national parks and other favorable localities, stocks which existed before the Great Slaughter. Five. Thirty miles south of this rolling volcanic interlude, the pristine Rockies, as if in shame of their moment of gorgeous softness, rear in contrast their sharpest and most heroic monument of bristling granite. Scarcely over the park's southern boundary, the foothills of the Teton Mountains swell gently toward their gothic climax. The country opens and roughens. The excellent road, which makes Jackson's Hole a practical part of the Yellowstone Pleasure Ground, lines through a rolling, partly wooded grazing ground of elk and deer. The time was when these wild herds made living possible for the nation's hunted desperados. For Jackson's Hole was the last refuge to yield to law and order. At the climax of this sudden granite protest, the Grand Teton rises 7,014 feet in seeming sheerness from Jackson Lake to its total altitude of 13,747 feet. To its right is Mount Moran, a monster only less. The others, clustering around them, have no names. Altogether they are few and group like the units of some fabulous barbaric stronghold. Fitted by size and majesty to be the climax of a mighty range, the Teton's concentrate their all in this one gigantic group. Quickly north and south they subside and pass. They are a granite island in a sea of plain. Seen across the lake, a dozen miles which seem but three, these clustered steeple temples rise sheer from the water. Their flanks are snow streaks still in August. Their shoulders hung with glaciers, their spires bold and shining. A greater contrast to the land from which we came and to which we presently return cannot be imagined. Geologically, the two have nothing in common. Scenically, the Teton set off and complete the spectacle of the Yellowstone. Hawaiian Islands, area 118 square miles. If this chapter is confined to the three volcano tops which Congress reserved on the islands of Hawaii and Maui in 1917, wonderful though these are, it will describe a small part indeed of the wide range of novelty, charm and beauty which will fall to the lot of those who visit the Hawaii National Park. One of the great advantages enjoyed by this national park, as indeed by Mount McKinley's, is its location in a surrounding of entire novelty, so that in addition to the object of his visit itself so supremely worthwhile, the traveler has also the pleasure of a trip abroad. In novelty at least, the Hawaii National Park has the advantage over the Alaskan Park because it involves the life and scenery of the tropics. We can find snow-crowned mountains and winding glaciers at home, but not equatorial jungles, sandalwood groves and surfriding. Enormous as this element of charm unquestionably is, this is not the place to sing the pleasures of the Hawaiian Islands. Their palm-fringed horizons, surf-edged coral reefs, tropical forests and gardens, plantations of pineapple and sugarcane, are as celebrated as their rainbows, earthquakes, and graceful girls dancing under tropical stars to the languorous ukulele. Leaving these in kindred spectacles to the steamship circulars and the library shelf, it is our part to note that the Hawaii National Park possesses the fourth largest volcanic crater in the world, whose aspect at sunrise is one of the world's famous spectacles, the largest active volcano in the world, and a lake of turbulent, glowing molten lava, the house of everlasting fire, which fills the beholder with awe. It was not at all then the gentle poetic aspects of the Hawaiian Islands which led Congress to create a national park there, though these form its romantic, contrasted setting. It was the extraordinary volcanic exhibit, that combination of thrilling spectacles of nature's colossal power, which for years have drawn travelers from the four quarters of the earth. The Hawaii National Park includes the summits of Halea Kala on the island of Maui, and Manaloa and Kilauea on the island of Hawaii. Spain claims the discovery of these delectable islands by Juan Gatano in 1555, but their formal discovery in exploration felt the lot of Captain James Cook in 1778. The Hawaiians thought him a god and loaded him with the treasures of the islands, but on his return the following year, his illness and the conduct of his crew ashore disillusioned them. They killed him and burned his flesh, but their priests deified his bones nevertheless. Parts of these were recovered later and a monument was erected over them. Then civil wars raged until all the tribes were conquered at the end of the 18th century by one chieftain, Kamehameha, who became king. His descendants reigned until 1874, when, the old royal line dying out, Kilauea Kawa was elected his successor. From this time the end hastened. A treaty with the United States ceded Pearl Harbor as a coaling station and entered American goods free of duty in return for which Hawaiian sugar and a few other products entered the United States free. This established the sugar industry on a large and permanent scale and brought laborers from China, Japan, the Azores, and Madeira, more than 10,000 Portuguese migrated to the islands, and the native population began a comparative decrease which still continues. After Kilauea Kawa's death, his sister, Lalea Locolani, succeeding him in 1891, the drift to the United States became rapid. When President Cleveland refused to annex the islands, a republic was formed in 1894, but the danger from Japanese immigration became so imminent that in 1898, during the Spanish American War, President McKinley yielded to the Hawaiian request, and the islands were annexed to the United States by resolution of Congress. The setting for the picture of our island park will be complete with several facts about its physical origin. The Hawaiian islands rose from the sea in a series of volcanic eruptions. Originally, doubtless, the greater islands were simple cones emitting lava, ash, and smoke, which coral grossed afterward enlarged and enriched. Kawa'i was the first to develop habitable conditions, and the island's southeast of it followed in order. Eight of the twelve are now habitable. The most eastern island of the group is Hawaii. It is also much the largest. This has three volcanoes, Manaloa, greatest of the three, and also the greatest volcanic mass in the world, is nearly the center of the island. Kilauea lies a few miles east of it, the summits of both are included in the national park. Mauna Kea, a volcanic cone of great beauty in the north center of the island, forming a triangle with the other two, is not a part of the national park. Northwest of Hawaii, across 60 miles or more of salt water, is the island of Maui, second largest of the group. In its southern part rises the distinguished volcano of Ahliakala, whose summit and world-famous crater is the third member of the national park. The other inhabited islands in order westward are Kahulaui, Lanai, Molokai, Awahu, Kauahi, and Nihia. No portions of these are included in the park. Kahulaui, Lanai, and Nihia are much the smallest of the group. Haleakala. Of the three volcanic summits which concern us, Haleakala is nearest the principal port of Honolulu, though not always the first visited. Its slopes nearly fill the southern half of the island of Maui. The popular translation of the name Haleakala is the house of the sun. Literally the word means the house built by the sun. The volcano is a monster of more than 10,000 feet, which bears upon its summit a crater of a size and beauty that make it one of the world's showplaces. This crater is seven and a half miles long, by two and a third miles wide. Only three known craters exceed Haleakala's in size. Aso-San, the monster crater of Japan, largest by far in the world, is 14 miles long by 10 wide, and contains many farms. Lago di Bulsino in Italy, next in size, measures eight and a half by seven and a half miles, and Monta Abano also in Italy, eight by seven miles. Exchanging your automobile for a saddle horse at the volcano's foot, you spend the afternoon in the ascent. Wonderful indeed, looking back, is the growing arc of plantation and sea, islands growing upon the horizon, Manakia and Manaloa, lifting distant snow-tipped peaks. You spend the night in a rest house on the rim of the crater, but not until you have seen the spectacle of sunset, and in the gray of the morning you are summoned to the supreme spectacle of sunrise. Thousands have crossed seas for Haleakala's sunrise. That first view of the crater from the rim is one never to be forgotten. Its floor lies two thousand feet below, an enormous, rainless, rolling plain, from which rise thirteen volcanic cones, clean cut, as regular in form, as carven things. Several of these are seven hundred feet in height. It must have been awe-inspiring, writes Castle, when its cones were spouting fire, and rivers of scarlet molten lava crawled along the floor. The stillness of this spot emphasizes its emotional effect. A word spoken ordinarily loud is like a shout. You can hear the footsteps of the goats far down upon the crater floor. Upon this floor grow plants, known nowhere else. They are famous under the name of silver swords, yucca-like gross three or four feet high, whose drooping filaments of bloom gleam like polished silver stilettos. When Mark Twain saw the crater, quote, vagrant white clouds came drifting along high over the sea in valley. Then they came in couples and groups. Then in imposing squadrons, gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together, a thousand feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean. Not a vestige of anything was left in view. But just a little of the rim of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon we sat. For a ghostly procession of wanderers, from the filmy hosts without, had drifted through a chasm in the crater wall, and filled round and round, and gathered and sunk and blended together till the abyss was stored to the brim with a fleecy fog. Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence reigned. Clear to the horizon, league upon league, the snowy folds, with shallow creases between, and with here and there stately piles of vapory architecture, lifting themselves aloft out of the common plain, some near at hand, some in the middle distances, and others relieving the monotony of the remote solitudes. There was little conversation for the impressive scene over awed speech. I felt like the last man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world, unquote. The extraordinary perfection of this desert crater is probably due to two causes, vents which tapped it far down the volcano's flanks prevented its filling with molten lava. Absence of rain has preserved its walls intact, and saved its pristine beauty from the defacement of erosion. Aliyah Kala has its legend, and this Jack London has sifted to its elements and given us in the cruise of the snark, I quote. It is told that long ago one Maui, the son of Hina, lived on what is now known as West Maui. His mother Hina employed her time in the making of Capus. She must have made them at night, for her days were occupied in trying to dry the Capus. Each morning and all morning she toiled at spreading them out in the sun, but no sooner were they out, than she began taking them in, in order to have them all under shelter for the night. For know that the days were shorter then than now. Maui watched his mother's feudal toil, and felt sorry for her. He decided to do something. Oh no, not to help her hang out and take in the Capus. He was too clever for that. His idea was to make the sun go slower. Perhaps he was the first Hawaiian astronomer. At any rate he took a series of observations of the sun from various parts of the island. His conclusion was that the sun's path was directly across Aliyah Kala. Unlike Joshua he stood in no need of divine assistance. He gathered a huge quantity of coconuts, from the fiber of which he braided a stout cord, and in one end of which he made a noose, even as the cowboys of Aliyah Kala do to this day. Next he climbed into the house of the sun. When the sun came tearing along the path, bent on completing its journey in the shortest time possible, the valiant youth threw his lariat around one of the sun's largest and strongest beams. He made the sun slow down some. Also he broke the beam short off, and he kept on roping and breaking off beams till the sun said it was willing to listen to reason. Maui set forth his terms of peace, which the sun accepted, agreeing to go more slowly thereafter. Wherefore Hina had ample time in which to dry her Capus, and the days are longer than they used to be, which last is quite in accord with the teachings of modern astronomy." Manaloa. Sixty miles south of Maui, Hawaii, largest of the island group, contains the two remaining parts of our national park. From every point of view, Manaloa and Manakia, both snow-crowned monsters approaching fourteen thousand feet of altitude, dominate the island. But Manakia is not a part of the national park. Kilauea, of less than a third its height, shares that honor with Manaloa. Of the two, Kilauea is much the older, and doubtless was a conspicuous figure in the old landscape. It has been largely absorbed in the immense swelling bulk of Manaloa, which, springing later from the island's soil nearby, no doubt diverting Kilauea's vents far below sea level, has sprawled over many miles. So nearly has the younger absorbed the older, that Kilauea's famous pit of molten lava seems almost to lie upon Manaloa's slope. Manaloa soars thirteen thousand six hundred seventy-five feet. Its snowy dome shares with Manakia, which rises even higher, the summit honors of the islands. From Hilo, the principal port of the island of Hawaii, Manaloa suggests the back of a Leviathan, its body hidden in the mists. The way up through forests of ancient mahogany and tangles of giant tree fern, then up many miles of lava slopes, is one of the inspiring tours in the mountain world. The summit crater, Mokwawia Wio, three-quarters of a mile long by a quarter mile wide, is as spectacular in action as that of Kilauea. This enormous volcanic mass has grown of its own output in comparatively a short time. For decades it has been extraordinarily frequent in eruption. Every five or ten years it gets into action with violence, sometimes at the summit, oftener of recent years, since the central vent has lengthened at weakened places on its sides. Few volcanoes have been so regularly and systematically studied. Kilauea The most spectacular exhibit of the Hawaii National Park is the Lake of Fire in the crater of Kilauea. Kilauea is unusual among volcanoes. It follows few of the popular conceptions. Older than the towering Manilauea, its height is only 4,000 feet. Its lavas have found vents through its flanks, which they have broadened and flattened. Doubtless its own lavas have helped Manilaueas to merge the two mountains into one. It is no longer explosive like the usual volcano. Since 1790, when it destroyed a native army, it has ejected neither rocks nor ashes. Its crater is no longer definitely bull-shaped. From the middle of a broad, flat plain, which really is what is left of the ancient great crater, drops a pit with vertical size within which boil its lavas. The pit, the Lake of Fire, is Halimama, commonly translated the House of Everlasting Fire. The correct translation is the House of Mama Fern, whose leaf is twisted and contorted like some forms of lava. Two miles and a little more from Halimama, on a part of the ancient crater wall stands the Hawaiian Volcanic Observatory, which is under the control of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The observatory was built for the special purpose of studying the pit of fire, the risings and fallings of whose lavas bear a relationship toward the volcanism of Manilauea, which is scientifically important, but which we need not discuss here. The traveler enters Hawaii by steamer through Hilo. He reaches the rim of Kilouea by automobile, an inspiring run of thirty-one miles over a road of volcanic glass, bordered with vegetation strange to eyes accustomed only to that of the temperate zone, brilliant hibiscus, native hardwood trees with feathery pom-poms for blossoms, and the giant ferns which tower overhead. On the rim are the hotels and the observatory. Steam jets emerge at intervals, and hot sulfur banks exhibit rich yellows. From there the way descends to the floor of the crater and unrolls a ribbon of flower-bordered road seven miles long to the pit of fire. By trail the distance is only two miles and a half across long stretches of hard lava congealed in ropes and ripples and strange contortions, where else is a spectacle one-tenth as appalling, so comfortably and quickly reached. Halimama is an irregular pit a thousand feet long with perpendicular sides, its depth varies. Sometimes one looks hundreds of feet down to the boiling surface, sometimes its lavas overrun the top. The fumes of sulfur are very strong, with the wind in your face. At these times too the air is extremely hot, there are cracks in the surrounding lava where you can scorch paper or cook a beef steak. Many have been the attempts to describe it, not having seen it myself, I quote two here, one a careful picture by a close student of the spectacle, Mr. William R. Castle Jr. of Honolulu, and the other a rapid sketch by Mark Twain. By daylight writes Castle, the lake of fire is a greenish-yellow, cut with ragged cracks of red that look like pale streaks of stationary lightning across its surface. It is restless, breathing rapidly, bubbling up at one point and sinking down in another, throwing up southern fountains of scarlet molten lava that play a few minutes and subside, leaving shimmering mounds which gradually settle to the level surface of the lake, turning brown and yellow as they sink. But as the daylight fades, the fires of the pit shine more brightly. Monoloa behind becomes a gray pale blue in substantial dome, and overhead stars begin to appear. As darkness comes the colors on the lake grow so intense that they almost hurt. The fire is not only red, it is blue and purple and orange and green. Blue flames shimmer and dark about the edges of the pit, back and forth across the surface of the restless mass. Sudden fountains paint blood red, the great plume of sulfur smoke, that rises constantly, to drift away across the poisoned desert of Ca. Sometimes the spurts of lava are so violent, so exaggerated by the night, that one draws back terrified, lest some atom of their molten substance just batter over the edge of the precipice. Sometimes the whole lake is in motion. Waves of fire toss and battle with each other and dash in clouds of bright vermilion spray against the black sides of the pit. Sometimes one of these sides falls in, with a roar that echoes back and forth, and mighty rocks are swallowed in the liquid mass of fire that closes over them in a whirlpool, like water over a sinking ship. Again everything is quiet, a thick scum forms over the surface of the lake, dead, like the scum on the surface of a lonely forest pool. Then it shivers, flashes of fire dart from side to side. The center bursts open, and a huge fountain of lava, twenty feet thick and fifty high, streams into the air and plays for several minutes. Waves of blinding fire flowing out from it, dashing against the sides until the black rocks are starred all over with bits of scarlet. To the spectator there is, through it all, no sense of fear. So intense, so tremendous is the spectacle, that silly little human feelings find no place. All sensations are submerged in a sense of awe. Mark Twain gays into Halemama's terrifying depths. It looked, he writes, like a colossal railroad map of the state of Massachusetts, done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it, imagine a cold black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire. Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in the dark crust, and in them the melted lava, the color a dazzling white just tinged with yellow, was boiling and surging furiously, and from these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while, and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged lightning. Those streams met other streams, and they mingled with and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like skate tracks on a popular skating ground. Sometimes streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing, and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small, steep hills, and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source, but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate lines of black and gold. Every now and then, masses of the dark crust broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a river. Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the super-incumbent crust broke through, split like a dazzling streak from five hundred to a thousand feet long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of the cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of ice when a great river breaks up, plunged downward, and were swallowed in the crimson cauldron. Then the wide expanse of the thaw maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and became black and level again. During a thaw every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white border which was superbly shaded inward by aurora borealis rays which were aflaming yellow where they joined the white border and from thence toward their points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich pale carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment and then dimmed and turned black. Some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she has just taken in sail and dropped anchor, provided one can imagine those ropes on fire. Through the glasses the little fountains scattered about looked very beautiful. They boiled and coughed and spluttered and discharged sprays of stringy red fire of about the consistency of mush, for instance, from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of brilliant white sparks, a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood and snowflakes." One can descend the sides and approach surprisingly close to the flaming surface, the temperature of which, by the way, is seventeen hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Such is the house of everlasting fire today, but who can say what it will be a year or a decade hence? A clogging or a shifting of the vents below sea level and Kilauea's lake of fire may become again explosive. Who will deny that Kilauea may not soar even above Manaloa? Stranger things have happened before this in the Islands of Surprise. End of Part 17. Part 18 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 Sedimentary National Parks. On Sedimentary Rock in scenery. The National Parks which are wrought in sedimentary rocks are Glacier, Mesa Verde, Hot Springs, Platt, Wind Cave, Sully's Hill, and Grand Canyon. Zion National Monument is carved from sedimentary rock. Also, several distinguished reservations in our southwest which conserve natural bridges and petrified forests. Sedimentary rocks have highly attractive scenic quality. Lying in strata, usually horizontal but often inclined by earth movements, sometimes even standing on end, they form marked and pleasing contrasts with the heavy massing of the igneous rocks and the graceful undulations and occasional sharp pointed summits of the lavas. As distinguished from igneous rocks which form under pressure in the earth's hot interior and from lava which results from volcanic eruption when fluid igneous rocks are released from pressure, sedimentary rocks are formed by the solidification of precipitations in water like limestone or from material resulting from rock disintegrations washed down by streams like sandstone and shale. The beds in which they lie one above another exhibit a wide range of tint and texture often forming spectacles of surpassing beauty and grandeur. These strata tend to cleave vertically, sometimes producing an appearance suggestive of masonry, frequently forming impressive cliffs but often they lie in unbroken beds of great area. When a number of well-defined strata cleave vertically and one end of the series sags below the other or lifts above it, the process which geologists call faulting, the scenic effect is varied in striking. Sometimes as in Glacier National Park it is puzzling and amazing. Many granitic and volcanic landscapes are variegated in places by accidental beds of sedimentary rock and conversely occasional sedimentary landscapes are set off by intrusions of igneous rocks. Besides variety of form sedimentary rocks furnish a wide range of color derived from mineral dyes dissolved out of rocks by erosion. The gorgeous tint of the Romilion Cliff in Utah and Arizona, the reds and greens of the Grand Canyon and Glacier National Park, the glowing cliffs of the Canyon de Chalet and the variegated hues of the painted desert are examples which have become celebrated. Geologists distinguish many kinds of sedimentary rocks. Scenically we need to consider only four, limestone, conglomerate, sandstone, and shale. Limestone is calcium carbonate derived principally from seawater, sometimes from freshwater, either by the action of microscopic organisms which absorb it for their shells or occasionally by direct precipitation from saturated solutions. The sediment from organisms, which is the principal source of American scenic limestones, collects as ooze in shallow lakes or seas and slowly hardens when lifted above the water level. Limestone is a common and prominent scenic rock. Generally it is gray or blue and weathers pale yellow. Moisture seeping in from above often reduces soluble minerals which drain away, leaving caves which sometimes have enormous size. The other sedimentary rocks which figure prominently in landscape are products of land erosion which rivers sweep into seas or lakes where they are promptly deposited. The coarse gravels which naturally fall first become conglomerate when cemented by the action of chemicals in water. The finer sandy particles become sandstone. The fine mud which deposits last eventually hardens into shale. Shale has many varieties but is principally hardened clay. It tends to split into slate-like plates each the thickness of its original deposit. It is usually dull brown or slate color but sometimes as in Glacier National Park and the Grand Canyon shows a variety of more or less brilliant colors and by weathering a wide variety of kindred tints. Sandstone which forms wherever moving water or wind has collected sands and pressure or chemical action has cemented them is usually buff but sometimes is brilliantly colored. The processes of nature have mixed the earth's scenic elements in seemingly inextricable confusion and the task of the geologist has been colossal. Fortunately for us the elements of scenery are few and their larger combinations broad and simple. Once the mine has grasped the outline in the processes and the eye has learned to distinguish elements and recognize forms the world is recreated for us. End of part 18. Part 19 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 Glaciered Peaks and Painted Shales Glacier National Park Northwestern Montana 1. To say that Glacier National Park is the Canadian Rockies done in Grand Canyon colors is to express a small part of a complicated fact. Glacier is so much less and more. It is less in its exhibit of ice and snow. Both are dying glacial regions and Glacier is hundreds of centuries nearer the end. No longer can it display snowy ranges in August and long sinuous Alaska-like glaciers at any time. Nevertheless it has its glaciers, 60 or more of them perched upon high rocky shells, the beautiful shrunken reminders of one-time monsters. Also it has the precipice-walled cirks and painted lake-studded valleys which these monsters left for the enjoyment of today. It is these cirks and valleys which constitute Glacier's unique feature which make it incomparable of its kind. Glacier's innermost sanctuaries of grandeur are comfortably accessible and intimately enjoyable for more than two months each summer. The greatest places of the Canadian Rockies are never accessible comfortably. Alpinists may clamber over their icy crevasses and scale their slippery heights in August, but the usual traveler will view their noblest spectacles from hotel porches or valley trails. This comparison is useful because both regions are parts of the same geological and scenic development in which Glacier may be said to be scenically, though by no means geologically, completed, and the Canadian Rockies still in the making. A hundred thousand years or more from now, the Canadian Rockies may have reached, except for colouring, the present scenic state of Glacier. Glacier National Park hangs down from the Canadian boundary line in northwestern Montana, where it straddles the continental divide. Adjoining it on the north is the Waterton Lakes Park, Canada. The Blackfeet Indian Reservation borders it on the east. Its southern boundary is Marias Pass, through which the great northern railway crosses the crest of the Rocky Mountains. Its western boundary is the north fork of the Flathead River. The park contains 1,534 square miles. Communication between the east and west sides within the park is only by trail across passes over the continental divide. There are parts of America quite as distinguished as Glacier, Mount McKinley for its enormous snowy mass and stature, Yosemite for the quality of its valley's beauty, Mount Rainier for its massive radiating glaciers, Crater Lake for its colour range in pearls and blues, Grand Canyon for its stupendous painted gulf, but there is no part of America or the Americas or of the world to match it of its kind. In respect to the particular wondrous thing, these glaciers of old left behind them when they shrank to shelve trifles, there is no other. At Glacier one sees what he never saw elsewhere and never will see again except at Glacier. There are mountains everywhere, but no others carved into shapes quite like these. Cirques in all lofty ranges, but not cirques just such as these, and because of these unique bordering highlands, there are nowhere else lakes having the particular kind of charm possessed by Glacier's lakes. Visitors seldom comprehend Glacier, hence they are mute or praise in generalities or vague superlatives. Those who have not seen other mountains find the unexpected and are puzzled. Those who have seen other mountains fail to understand the difference in these. I have never heard comparison with any region except the Canadian Rockies, and this seldom very intelligent. I miss the big glaciers and snowy mountain tops, says the traveller of one type. You can really see something here beside snow, and how stunning it all is, says the traveller of another type. My God, man, where are your artists? cried an Englishman who had come to St. Mary Lake to spend a night and was finishing his week. They ought to be here in regiments, not that this is the greatest thing in the world, but that there's nothing else in the world like it. Yet this emotional traveller, who had seen the Himalayas, Andes, and Canadian Rockies, could not tell me clearly why it was different. Neither could the others explain why they liked it better than the Canadian Rockies, or why its beauty puzzled and disturbed them. It is only he whom the intelligent travel has educated to analyze and distinguish who sees in the finest and the extraordinary distinction of glaciers' mountain forms the completion of the more heroic undevelopment north of the border. 2. The elements of glaciers' personality are so unusual that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to make phrase describe it. Comparison fails. Photographs will help, but not very efficiently, because they do not convey its size, color, and reality, or perhaps, I should say, its unreality, for there are places like Two Medicine Lake in still pale mid-morning, St. Mary Lake during one of its gold sunsets, and the cirks of the south fork of the Belly River under all conditions, which never can seem actual. To picture glacier as nearly as possible, imagine two mountain ranges roughly parallel in the north, where they pass the continental divide between them, across a magnificent high intervening valley, and in the south, merging into a wild and apparently planless massing of high peaks and ranges. Imagine these mountains, repeating everywhere huge pyramids, enormous stone gables, elongated cones, and many other unusual shapes, including numerous sawtooth edges, which rise many thousand feet upward from swelling sides, and suggest nothing so much as overturned keelboats. Imagine ranges glacier-bitten alternately on either side, with cirks of three or four thousand feet of precipitous depth. Imagine these cirks, often so nearly meeting, that the intervening walls are knife-like edges, miles of such walls carry the continental divide, and occasionally these cirks meet, and the intervening wall crumbles, and leaves a pass across the divide. Imagine places where cirque walls have been so bitten outside, as well as in, that they stand like amphitheaters, build it up from foundations, instead of gouged out of rock from above. Imagine these mountains, plentifully snow-spattered upon their northern slopes, and bearing upon their shoulders many small and beautiful glaciers, perched upon rock-shells, above and back of the cirks, left by the greater glaciers, of which they are the remainders. These glaciers are nearly always wider than they are long. Of these I have seen only three with elongated lobes. One is the Blackfeet Glacier, whose interesting west lobe is conveniently situated for observation south of Gunsight Lake, and another romantically beautiful Agassi Glacier, in the far northwest of the park, whose ice currents converge in a tongue which drops steeply to its snout. These elongations are complete miniatures, each exhibiting in little more than half a mile of length all usual glacial phenomena, including caves and icefalls. Occasionally, as on the side of Mount Jackson at Gunsight Pass and east of it, one notices small elongated glaciers occupying clefts and steep slopes. The largest and most striking of these tongued glaciers is the westernmost of the three-carter glaciers on the slopes of Mount Carter. It cascades its entire length into Bowman Valley, and Marius R. Campbell's suggestion that it should be renamed the Cascading Glacier deserves consideration. Imagine deep rounded valleys emerging from these cirks and twisting snake-like among enormous and sometimes grotesque rock masses, which often are inconceivably twisted and tumbled, those of each drainage basin converging fan-like to its central valley. Sometimes a score or more of cirks, great and small, unite their valley streams for the making of a river. Seven principal valleys, each the product of such a group, emerge from the east side of the park, thirteen from the west. Imagine hundreds of lakes whose waters, fresh run from snowfield and glacier, brilliantly reflect the odd surrounding landscape. Each glacier has its lake or lakes of robin's egg blue. Every successive shelf of every glacial stairway has its lake, one or more, and every valley has its greater lake or string of lakes. Glacier is preeminently the park of lakes. When all is said and done, they constitute its most distinguished single element of supreme beauty. For several of them, enthusiastic admirers loudly claim world preeminence. And finally, imagine this picture done in soft glowing colors. Not only the blue sky, the flowery meadows, the pine-green valleys, and the innumerable many-hued waters, but the rocks, the mountains, and the cirks besides. The glaciers of old penetrated the most colorful depths of earth's skin, the very ancient Algonquian strata, that from which a part of the Grand Canyon also was carved. At this point, the rocks appear in four differently colored layers. The lowest of these is called the Alton Limestone. There are about sixteen hundred feet of it, pale blue within, weathering pale buff. Whole yellow mountains of this rock hang upon the eastern edge of the park. Next above the Alton lies thirty four hundred feet of Apicuni argillite, or dull green shale. The tint is pale, deepening to that familiar in the lower part of the Grand Canyon. It weathers every darkening shade to very dark greenish brown. Next above lies twenty two hundred feet of Grinnell argillite, or red shale, a dull rock of varying pinks which weathers many shades of red and purple, deepening in places almost to black. There is some gleaming white quartzite mixed with both these shales. Next above lies more than four thousand feet of Sia limestone, very solid, very massive, iron gray with an insistent flavor of yellow and weathering buff. This heavy stratum is the most impressive part of the glacier landscape. Horizontally through its middle runs a dark broad ribbon of diorite, a rock as hard as granite which once, when molten, burst from below and forced its way between horizontal beds of limestone. And occasionally, as in the swift current and triple divide passes, there are dull iron black lavas in heavy twisted masses. Above all of these colored stratum, one slay still another shale, a very brilliant red. Fragments of this, which geologists call the Kintla formation, may be seen topping mountains here and there in the northern part of the park. Imagine these rich stratum hung east and west across the landscape, and sagging deeply in the middle so that a horizontal line would cut all colors diagonally. Now imagine a softness of line as well as color, resulting probably from the softness of the rock there is none of the hard insistence, the uncompromising definiteness of the granite landscape. And imagine further an impression of antiquity, a feeling akin to that with which one enters a medieval ruin or sees the pyramids of Egypt. Only here is the look of immense, unmeasured, immeasurable age. More than at any place except perhaps the rim of the Grand Canyon, does one seem to stand in the presence of the infinite, an instinct which, while it baffles analysis, is sound, for there are few rocks of the earth's skin so aged as these ornate shales and limestones. And now at last you can imagine glacier. Three. But with glacier this is not enough. To see, to realize in full its beauty, still leaves one puzzled. One of the peculiarities of the landscape due perhaps to its differences is its insistence upon explanation. How came this prehistoric plain so etched with serks and valleys as to leave standing only worm-like crests, knife-edged walls, amphitheaters, and isolated peaks? The answer is the story of a romantic episode in the absorbing history of America's making. Somewhere between forty and six hundred million years ago, according to the degree of conservatism controlling the geologist who does the calculating, these lofty mountains were deposited in the shape of muddy sediments on the bottom of shallow freshwater lakes, whose waves left many ripple marks upon the soft muds of its shores, fragments of which, hardened now to shale, are frequently found by tourists. So ancient was the period that these deposits lay next above the primal archaean rocks, and mark therefore almost the beginning of accepted geological history. Life was then so nearly at its beginnings that the forms which Walcott found in the Sia limestone were not at first fully accepted as organic. Thereafter, during a time so long that none may even estimate it, certainly for many millions of years, the history of the region leaves traces of no extraordinary change. It sank possibly thousands of feet beneath the freshwater's tributary to the sea, which once swept from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, and accumulated their sediments, which today are scenic limestones and shales, and doubtless other sediments above these which have wholly passed away. It may have alternated above and below water level many times, as our Southwest has done. Eventually, under earth pressures concerning whose cause many theories have lived and died, it rose to remain until our times. Then, millions of years ago, but still recently as compared with the whole vast lapse we are considering, came the changes which seemed dramatic to us as we look back upon them accomplished, but which came to pass so slowly that no man, had man then lived, could have noticed a single step of progress in the course of a long life. Under earth pressures, the skin buckled and the rocky mountains rose. At some stage of this process, the range cracked along its crest from what is now Mariah's Pass to a point just over the Canadian border, and a couple of hundred miles farther north, from neighborhood of Banff to the northern end of the Canadian Rockies. Then the great overthrust followed, side pressures of inconceivable power forced upward the western edge of this crack, including the entire crust from the Algonquian strata up, and thrust it over the eastern edge. During the overthrusting, which may have taken a million years, and during the millions of years since, the frosts have chiseled open and the rains have washed away, all the overthrust strata, the accumulations of the geological ages from Algonquian times down, except only that one bottom layer. This alone remained for the three ice invasions of the glacial age to carve into the extraordinary area which is called today the Glacier National Park. The Lewis overthrust, so called because it happened to the Lewis range, is ten to fifteen miles wide. The eastern boundary of the park roughly defines its limit of progress. Its signs are plain to the eye-taught to perceive them. The yellow mountains on the eastern edge, near the gateway to Lake McDermott, lie on top of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, whose surface is many millions of years younger, and quite different in coloring. Similarly, Chief Mountain, at the entrance of the Belly River Valley, owes much of its remarkable distinction to the incompatibility of its form and color with the prairie upon which it lies, but out of which it seems to burst. The bottom of McDermott Falls at many Glacier Hotel is plainly a younger rock than the colored Algonquian limestones which form its brink. Perhaps thousands of years after the overthrust was accomplished, another tremendous faulting still further modified the landscape of today. The overthrust edge cracked lengthwise, this time west of the continental divide, all the way from the Canadian line southward nearly to Mariah's Pass. The edge of the strata west of this crack sank perhaps many thousands of feet, leaving great precipices on the west side of the divide, similar to those on the east side. There was this great difference, however, in what followed, the elongated gulf or ditch thus formed became filled with the deposits of later geological periods. This whole process, which also was very slow in movement, is important in explaining the confirmation and scenic peculiarities of the west side of the park which, as the tourists sees it today, is remarkably different from those of the east side. Here the great limestone ranges, glaciered, surked, and precipice as on the east side, suddenly give place to broad, undulating plains which constitute practically the whole of the great west side, from the base of the mountains on the east to the valley of the flathead which forms the park's western boundary. These plains are grown thickly with splendid forests, cross ranges largely glacier built, stretch west from the high mountains, subsiding rapidly, and between these ranges lie long winding lakes, forest grown to their edges, which carry the western drainage of the continental divide through outlet streams into the flathead. The inconceivable lapse of time covered in these titanic operations of nature and their excessive slowness of progress rob them of much of their dramatic quality. Perhaps an inch of distance was an extraordinary advance for the Lewis overthruss to make in any ordinary year, and doubtless there were lapses of centuries where no measurable advance was made. Yet sometimes sudden setlings, accompanied by more or less extended earthquakes, must have visibly altered local landscapes. Were it possible by some such mental foreshortening as that by which the wizards of the screen can press a life into a minute, for imagination to hasten this progress into the compass of a few hours, how overwhelming would be the spectacle. How tremendously would loom this advancing edge, which at first we may conceive as having enormous thickness, how it must have cracked, crumbled, and fallen in frequent titanic crashes as it moved forward. It does not need the imagination of Doree to picture this advance. Thus hastened and fancy. Grim, relentless as death, its enormous towering head, lost in eternal snows, its feet shaken by earthquakes, accumulating giant glaciers only to crush them into powder, resting, then pushing forward and slow, smashing, reverberating shoves. How the accumulations of all periods may be imagined crashing together into the depths. Solurian gastropods, strange Devonian fishes, enormous triassic reptiles, the rich and varied shells of the Jurassic, the dinosaurs and primitive birds of the Cretaceous, the little early horses of the Eocene, and Miocene's camels and mastodons mingling their fossil remnants in a democracy of ruin to defy the eternal ages. It all happened, but unfortunately for a romantic conception it did not happen with dramatic speed. Hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of years intervened between the greater stages of progress which, with intervening lesser stages, merged into a seldom broken quietude such as that which impresses today's visitor to the mountaintops of Glacier National Park, and who can say that the landscape which today's visitor, with the inborn arrogance of man, looks upon as the thing which the ages have completed for his pleasure, may not merely represent a minor stage in a progress still more terrible. The grist of creation's past milling has disappeared. The waters of heaven, collected and stored in snow fields and glaciers, to be released in seasonal torrents, have washed it all away. Not a sign remains today save here and there perhaps a fragment of Cretaceous coal. All has been ground to powder and carried off by flood and stream to enrich the soils and up build later strata in the drainage basins of the Saskatchewan, the Columbia and the Mississippi. It is probable that little remained but the Algonquian shales and limestones when the Ice Age sent southward the first of its three great invasions. Doubtless already there were glaciers there of sorts, but the lowering temperatures which accompanied the ice sheets developed local glaciers so great of size that only a few mountaintops were left exposed. It was then that these extraordinary cirks were carved. There were three such periods during the Ice Age, between which and after which stream erosion resumed its untiring sway. The story of the ice is written high upon glaciers' walls and far out on the eastern plains. 4. Into this wonderland the visitor enters by one of two roads. Either he leaves the railroad at Glacier Park on the east side of the Continental Divide or at Belton on the west side. In either event he can cross to the other side only a foot or on horseback over passes. The usual way is in through Glacier Park. There is a large hotel at the station from which automobile stages run northward to chalets at Two Minneson Lake, the Cutbank Valley and St. Mary Lake and to the many glacier hotel and chalets at Lake McDermott. A road also reaches Lake McDermott from Canada by way of Bab and Canadian visitors can reach the trails at the head of Waterton Lake by boat from their own Waterton Lakes Park. Those entering at Belton, where the park headquarters are located, find chalets at the railroad station and an excellent hotel near the head of Lake McDonald. There is also a comfortable chalet close to the Sperry Glacier. To see Glacier as thoroughly as Glacier deserves and to draw freely on its abundant resources of pleasure and inspiration, one must travel the trails and pitch his tent where day's end brings him. But that does not mean that Glacier cannot be seen and enjoyed by those to whom comfortable hotel accommodations are a necessity or even by those who find trail traveling impossible. Visitors therefore fall into three general classes, all of which may study scenery which quite fully covers the range of Glacier's national phenomena and peculiar beauty. The largest of these classes consists of those who can travel or think they can travel only in vehicles and can find satisfactory accommodations only in good hotels. The intermediate class includes those who can, at a pinch, ride 10 or 12 miles uncomfortably saddled horses, which walk the trails at two or three miles an hour and who do not object to the somewhat primitive but thoroughly comfortable overnight accommodations of the chalets. Finally comes the small class which constantly will increase of those who have the time and inclination to leave the beaten path with tent and camping outfit for the splendid wilderness and the places of supreme magnificence which are only for those who seek. The man, then, whose tendency to gout let us say, forbids him ride a horse or walk more than a couple of easy miles a day may nevertheless miss nothing of Glacier's meaning and magnificence provided he takes the trouble to understand. But he must take the trouble. He must comprehend the few examples that he sees. This is his penalty for refusing the rich experience of the trail, which, out of its very fullness, drives meaning home with little mental effort. His knowledge must be got from six places only which may be reached by vehicle. At least three of which, however, may be included among the world's great scenic places. He can find at two medicine, St. Mary and McDermott superb examples of Glacier's principle scenic elements. Entering at Glacier Park he will have seen the range from the plains, an important beginning. Already approaching from the east he has watched it grow wonderfully on the horizon so suddenly do these painted mountains spring from the grassy plain that it is a relief to recognize in them the advanced guard of the Louis Overthrust, vast fragments of upheavals of the depths pushed eastward by the centuries to their final resting places upon the surface of the prairie. From the hotel porches they glow gray and yellow and purple and rose and pink according to the natural coloring of their parts and the will of the sun a splendid ever-changing spectacle. End of Part 19 Part 20 Of the Book of the National Parks This Libervox Recording is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Stirling Yard Glacier's Peaks and Painted Shales Continued The Two Medicine Country An hour's automobile ride from Glacier Park Hotel will enable our traveler to penetrate the range at a point of supreme beauty and stand beside a chalet at the foot of Two Medicine Lake. He will face what appears to be a circular lake in a densely forested valley from whose shore rises a view of mountains which will take his breath. In the near center stands a cone of enormous size and magnificence. Mount Rockwell faintly blue, mistily golden, richly purple, dull silver, or red and gray according to the favor of the hour and the sky. Upon its left and somewhat back rises a smaller similar cone, flatter but quite as perfectly proportioned, known as Grizzly Mountain, and upon its right less regular masses. In the background, connecting all, are more distant mountains flecked with snow, the continental divide. Towering mountains close upon him upon both sides. That upon his right a celebrity in red argolite known as Rising Wolf. He sees all this from a beach of many colored pebbles. Few casual visitors have more than a midday view of Two Medicine Lake, for the stage returns in the afternoon. The glory of the sunset and the wonder before sunrise are for the few who stay over at the chalet. The lover of the exquisite cannot do better, for though beyond lies seen surpassing this in the qualities which bring to the lips the shout of joy, I am convinced that nothing elsewhere equals the Two Medicine canvas in the perfection of delicacy. It is the messuniere of glacier. Nor can the student of nature's processes afford to miss the study of Two Medicine's marvelously complete and balanced system of cirques and valleys. Though this, of course, is not for the rheumatic traveller, but for him who fears not horse and tent, such an explorer will find thrills with every passing hour. Giant Mount Rockwell will produce one when a side view shows that its apparent cone is merely the smaller eastern end of a ridge two miles long, which culminates in a towering summit on the divide, Pumpley Pillar, with the proportions of a monument when seen from near the lake, becomes, seen sideways, another long and exceedingly beautiful ridge striking examples these of the leavings of converging glaciers of old. Two Medicine Lake proves to be long and narrow, the chalet view being the long way, and Upper Two Medicine Lake proves to be an emerald encircled pearl in a silvery gray setting. The climax of such a several-days trip is a night among the coyotes at the head of the main valley and a morning upon Dawson Pass overlooking the indescribable tangle of peak, precipice, and canyon lying west of the continental divide. Taken as a whole, the Two Medicine drainage basin is an epitome of glacier in miniature, to those entering the park on the east side, and seeing it first, it becomes an admirable introduction to the greater park. To those who have entered on the west side and finish here, it is an admirable farewell review, especially as its final picture sounds the note of scenic perfection. Where there nothing else of glacier, this spot will become in time itself a world celebrity. Incidentally, exceedingly lively eastern brook trout will afford an interesting hour to one who floats a fly down the short stream into the lake-lit at the foot of Two Medicine Lake, not far below the chalet. There are also fish below trick falls. The Spectacle of St. Mary. St. Mary Lake, similarly situated in the outlet valley of a much greater group of cirques north of Two Medicine, offers a picture as similar in kind as two canvases, which have been painted by the same hand, but they widely differ in composition and magnificence. Two Medicine's preciousness yields to St. Mary's elemental grandeur. The steamer which brings our rheumatic traveller from the motor stage at the foot of the lake lands him at the upper chalet group, appropriately Swiss, which finds vantage on a rocky promontory for the view of the divide. Gigantic mountains of deep red argolite, grotesquely carved, closed in the sides, and with lake and sky wonderfully frame the amazing central picture of pointed pyramids, snow fields, hanging glaciers, and silvery ridges merging into the sky. Seen on the way into glacier, St. Mary is a prophecy which will not be fulfilled elsewhere in charm, though often far exceeded in degree. Seen leaving glacier, it combines with surpassing novelty scenic elements whose possibilities of further gorgeous combination the trip through the park has seemed to exhaust. The St. Mary picture is impossible to describe. Its colors vary with the hours and the atmosphere's changing conditions. It is silver, golden, mauve, blue, lemon, misty white, and red by turn. It is seen clearly in the morning with the sun behind you. Afternoons and sunsets offer theatrical effects, often baffling, always lovely, and different. Pointed fuselage and peaked Reynolds mountains often lose their tops in lowering mists. So often does going to the sun mountain in the nearby right foreground. So not so often does keel shape citadel mountain on the nearby left. Also at times majestic little chief, he of lofty mean and snow-dash crown, and stolid red eagle whose gigantic reflection reddens a mile of waters. It is these close-up monsters, even more than the colorful ghosts of the western horizon, which stamp St. Mary's personality. From the porches of the chalets and the deck of the steamer in its evening tour of the lake end, the traveler will note the enormous size of those upper valleys which once combined their glaciers as now they do their streams. He will guess that the glacier which once swept through the deep gorge, in whose bottom now lies St. Mary's lake, was several thousand feet in thickness. He will long to examine those upper valleys and reproduce in imagination the amazing spectacle of long ago. But they are not for him. That vision is reserved for those who ride the trails. The scenic climax of the swift current. Again passing north, the automobile stage reaches Rhodes End at McDermott Lake, the fan handle of the swift current drainage basin, overlooking a magnificent part of each of its contributing valleys, the lake itself supremely beautiful, may well deserve its reputation as Glacier's Scenic Centre. I have much sympathy with the thousands who claim supremacy for McDermott Lake. Lake McDonald has its wonderfully wooded shores, its majestic length and august vista. Helen Lake its unequaled wildness. Bowman Lake its incomparable view of Glacier's shrouded divide. But McDermott has something of everything. It is a composite, a mosaic masterpiece with every stone a gem. There is no background from which one looks forward to the view. Its horizon contains 360 degrees of view, from the towering south gable of that rock temple to God the Creator, which the map calls Mount Gould, around the circle it offers an unbroken panorama in superlative. In no sense by way of comparison, which is absurd between scenes so different, but merely to help realisation by contrast with what is well known, let us recall the Yosemite Valley. Yosemite is a valley, swift current and enclosure. Yosemite is grey and shining, swift current richer far in colour. Yosemite's walls are rounded, peaked and polished, swift currents, toothed, torn and crumbling. The setting sun shines through the holes worn by frost and water in the living rock. Yosemite guards her western entrance, with a shaft of grey granite rising 3600 feet from the valley floor, and her eastern end by granite domes of 5000 and 6000 feet. Swift currents rocks gather round her central lake, out in 3200 feet above the lake's level, Hankel 3800 feet, Wilbur 4500 feet, and Grinnell 4000, Gould 4700, Allen 4500, all of coloured strata, green at base, then red, then grey. Yosemite has its winding river and waterfalls, swift current, its lakes and glaciers. Swift current has the repose, but not the softness of Yosemite. Yosemite is unbelievably beautiful. Swift current inspires wandering awe. McDermott Lake, focus point of all this natural glory, is scarcely a mile long and narrow. It may be vivid blue and steel blue and milky blue, and half a dozen shades of green and pink all within twice as many minutes, according to the whim of the breeze, the changing atmosphere and the clouding of the sun. Often it suggests nothing so much as a pool of dull green paint, or it may present a reversed image of mountains, glaciers and sky in their own colouring. Or at sunset it may turn lemon or purple or crimson or orange or a blending of all, or with rushing storm clouds it may suddenly lose every hint of any colour and become a study in black, white and intermediate greys. There are times when, from hotel porch, rock or boat, the towering peaks and connecting limestone walls become suddenly so fairy-like that they lose all sense of reality, seeming to merge into their background of sky, from which, nevertheless, they remain sharply differentiated. The rapidity and the variety of change in the appearance of the water is nothing to that in the appearance of these magical walls and mountains, now near, now distant, now luring, now forbidding, now gleaming as if with their own light, now gloomy in threat, they lose not their hold on the eye for a moment. The unreality of McDermott Lake, the sense it often imparts of impossibility, is perhaps its most striking feature. One suspects he dreams, awake. The Scenic Circle To realise the spot as best we may, let us pause on the bridge among those casting for trout below the upper fall and glance around. To our left rises Allen Mountain, rugged, irregular, forest-clothed, halfway up its 4,500 feet of elevation, above the valley floor. Beyond it a long gigantic wall sets in at right angles, blue, shining, serrated, supporting, apparently on the lake edge, an enormous gable end of gray limestone, banded with black diorite, a veritable personality comparable with Yosemite's most famous rocks. This is Mount Gould. Next is the Grinnell Glacier, hanging, glistening in the air, dripping waterfalls, back-rounded by the gnawed top of the venerable garden wall. Then comes in turn the majestic mass of Mount Grinnell, four miles long, culminating at the lakeside in an enormous, party-coloured pyramid more impressive from the hotel than even Rockwell is from two medicine chalets. Then upon its right appears a wall, which is the unnamed continuation of the garden wall, and plastered against the side of Swift Current Mountain, three small hanging glaciers, seeming in the distance like two long parallel snow banks. Then Mount Wilbur, another giant pyramid, gray, towering, massively carved, grandly proportioned, kingly and bearing. Again upon its right emerges still another continuation, also unnamed, of the garden wall, this section loftiest of all, and bitten deeply by the ages. A part of it is instantly recognized from the hotel window, as part of the skyline, surrounding famous Iceberg Lake. Its right is lost behind the nearer slopes of Red Mount Henkel, which swings back upon our right, bringing the eye nearly to its starting point. A glance out behind between mountains upon the limitless lake-dotted plain completes the scenic circle. McDermott Lake, by which I hear me in the Swift Current enclosure as seen from the many-glacier hotel, is illustrative of all of glacier. There are wilder spots by far, some which frighten. There are places of nobler beauty, though as I write I know I shall deny it the next time I stand on McDermott's shores. There are supreme places, which at first glance seem to have no kinship with any other place on earth. Nevertheless, McDermott contains all of glacier's elements, all her charm, and practically all her combinations. It is the place of places to study glacier. It is also a place to dream away idle weeks. So he who cannot ride or walk the trails may still see and understand glacier in her majesty. Besides the places I have mentioned, he may see, from the Cut Bank chalet, a characteristic forested valley of great beauty, and at Lewis's Hotel on Lake McDonald, the finest spot accessible upon the broad west side, the playground, as the east side is the show place of hundreds of future thousands. So many are the short horseback trips from many-glacier hotel to places of significance and beauty, that it is hard for the timid to withstand the temptation of the trail. Four miles will reach Grinnell Lake at the foot of its glacier. Six miles will penetrate the Cracker Lake Gorge at the perpendicular base of Mount Sia. Eight miles will disclose the astonishing spectacle of Iceberg Lake, and nine miles will cross the swift current pass to the Granite Park chalet. Iceberg Lake typical of all. In some respects, Iceberg Lake is glacier supreme spectacle. There are few spots so wild. There may be no easily accessible spot in the world half so wild. Imagine a horseshoe of perpendicular rock wall, 2700 to 3500 feet high, a glacier in its inmost curve, a lake of icebergs in its center. The back of the tower peak of Mount Wilbur is the southern end of this horseshoe. This enclosure was not built up from below as it looks, but bitten down within and without, it was left. On the edge of the lake in early July, the sun sets at four o'clock. Stupendous as Iceberg Lake is as a spectacle, its highest purpose is illustrative. It explains glacier. Here by this lakeside, fronting the glacier's floating edge and staring up at the jagged top in front and on either side, one comprehends at last. The appalling story of the past seems real. The Climax at Granite Park It is at Granite Park that one realizes the geography of glacier. You have crossed the continental divide and emerged upon a lofty abutment just west of it. You are very nearly in the park's center, and on the margin of a forested canyon of impressive breadth and depth, lined on either side by mountain monsters, and reaching from Mount Cannon at the head of Lake McDonald, northward to the Alberta plain. The western wall of this vast avenue is the Livingston Range. Its eastern wall is the Lewis Range. Both in turn carry the continental divide, which crosses the avenue from Livingston to Lewis by way of low-crowned, flat-top mountain, a few miles north of where you stand, and back to Livingston by way of Clements Mountain, a few miles south. Opposite you, across the chasm, rises Snowy Heaven's Peak. South-west lies Lake McDonald, hidden by Heaven's shoulder. South is Logan Pass, carrying another trail across the divide, and disclosing hanging gardens beyond on Reynolds' eastern slope. Still south of that, unseen from here, is famous Gunsight Pass. It is a stirring spectacle. But wait! A half hour's climb to the summit of Swift Current Mountain close at hand, the chalet is most of the way up to start with, and all of Glacier lies before you like a model in relief. Here you see the Iceberg Cirque from without and above. The belly river chasm yawns enormously. Mount Cleveland, monarch of the region, flaunts his crown of snow among his nearby court of only lesser monsters. The avenue of the giants deeply splits the northern half of the park. That land of extravagant accent, mysterious because so little known, the Glacier of tourists lying south. A marvelous spectacle this, indeed, and one which clears up many misconceptions. The Canadian Rockies hang on the misty northern horizon. The Montana Plains float eastward. The American Rockies roll south and west. Over Gunsight Pass. To me one of the most stirring sights in all Glacier is the view of Gunsight Pass from the foot of Gunsight Lake. The immense glacier uplift of Mount Jackson on the south of the pass. The wild, white insides of Gunsight Mountain opposite, dropping to the upturned strata of red shale at the water's edge. The pass itself, so well named, perched above the dark precipice at the lake's head. The corkscrew, which the trail makes of Jackson's perpendicular flank, and its passage across a mammoth snowbank high in the air. These, in contrast with the silent black water of the sunken lake, produce ever the same thrill, however often seen. The look back, too, once the pass is gained, down St. Mary's Gracious Valley to going to the Sun Mountain and its horizon companions. Sun Mountain, for short, always a personality, is never from any other point of view so undeniably the crowned majesty, as from Gunsight Pass. And finally looking forward, which in this speaking means westward, the first revelation of Lake Ellen Wilson gives a shock of odd astonishment whose memory can never pass. Truly, Gunsight is a pass of many sensations. For leading Lake Ellen Wilson and its eighteen hundred feet of vertical frothing outlet, the westward trail crosses the shoulder of Lincoln Peak to this very glacier, and its inviting chalet, where the biggest hoary marmot I ever saw sat upon my dormitory porch. An eight miles farther down the mountain, beautiful Lake Macdonald. Destiny of the West Side Although it was settled earlier, Glacier's West Side is less developed than its East Side, this because, for the most part, its scenery is less sensational, though no less gorgeously beautiful. Its five long lakes, of which Macdonald is much the longest and largest, head up toward the snowy monsters of the divide. Their thin bodies wind leisurely westward among superbly forested slopes. Its day is still to come. It is the land of the bear, the moose, the deer, the trout, and summer leisure. Its destiny is to become Glacier's Vacation Playground. The Coming Splendors of the North The wild north side of Glacier, its larger, bigger featured and occasionally greater part, is not yet for the usual tourist. For many years from this writing, doubtless, none will know it but the traveller with the tent and pack-train. He alone, and may his tribe increase, will enjoy the gorgeous cirques and canyons of the Belly River, the wild quietude of the Waterton Valley, the regal splendors of brown paths, and the headwater spectacles of the logging, courts, bowmen, and Kintla valleys. He alone will realize that here is a land of greater power, larger measures, and bigger horizons. And yet with Kintla comes Climax. Crossing the border, the mountains subside, the glaciers disappear, Canada's Waterton Lakes Park begins at our Climax, and merges in half a dozen miles to the great prairies of Alberta. It is many miles northwest before the Canadian Rockies assume proportions of superlative scenic grandeur. The Belly River Valleys To realize the growing bigness of the land northward, one only has to cross the wall from Iceburg Lake into the Belly River Canyon. Only, indeed, in 1917 it took us forty miles of detour outside the park, even under the shadow of Chief Mountain, to cross the wall from Iceburg Lake, the west side precipice of which is steeper even than the east. The Belly River drainage basin is itself bigger and its mountains bulk in proportion. Eighteen glaciers contribute to the making of perhaps as many lakes. The yellow mountains of its northern slopes invade Canada. The borders of its principal valley are two monster mountains. Cleveland, the greatest in the park for mass and height and intricate outline, the other Merritt, in some respects the most interesting of glaciers abundant collection of majestic peaks. There are three valleys. The North Fork finds its way quickly into Canada. The Middle Fork rises in a group of glaciers high under the continental divide and descends four giant steps, a lake upon each step, to two greater lakes of noble aspect in the valley bottom. The South Fork emerges from Helen Lake deep in the gulf below to the Ahern Glacier across the garden wall from Iceburg Lake. Between the middle and south forks, Mount Merritt rises 9,944 feet in altitude, minareted like a medieval fort, and hollow as a bowl, escaping chasm hung with glaciers. This is the valley of abundance. The waters are large, their trout many and vigorous. The bottoms are extravagantly rich in grasses and flowers. The forests are heavy and full-bodied. There is no open place, even miles beyond its boundaries, which does not offer views of extraordinary nobility. Every man who enters it becomes enthusiastically prophetic of its future. After all, the belly river country is easily visited. A leisurely horseback journey from McDermott, that is all. Three days among the strange yellow mountains of the overthruss eastern edge, including two afternoons among the fighting trout of Kennedy Creek and Slide Lake, and two nights in camp along the wild bear arroyos of the Algonquian invasion of the prairie, an interesting prelude to the fullness of wilderness life to come. I dwell upon the belly valleys because their size, magnificence, and accessibility suggest a future of public use. Nothing would be easier, for instance, than a road from Babb to join the road already in from Canada. The name naturally arouses curiosity. Why belly? Was it not the Anglo-Saxon frontier's pronunciation of the Frenchman's original bell? The river, remember, is mainly Canadian, surely in all its forks and tributaries, it was and is the beautiful river. The Avenue of the Giants The Avenue of the Giants looms in any forecast of Glacier's future. It really consists of two valleys joined and on at their beginnings on Flattop Mountain—McDonald Creek flowing south, Little Coutinet flowing north. The road which will replace the present trail up this avenue, from the much-traveled south to Waterton Lake and Canada, is a matter doubtless of a distant future, but it is so manifestly destiny that it must be accepted as the key to the greater glacier to come. Uniting at its southern end roads from both sides of the divide, it will reach the belly valleys by way of Ahern Pass, the Bowman and Kintla valleys by way of Brown Pass, and will terminate at the important tourist settlement, which is destined to grow at the splendid American end of Waterton Lake. Incidentally, it will become an important motor highway between Canada and America. Until then, though all these are now accessible by trail, the high distinction of the Bowman and the Kintla valleys' supreme expression of the glowing genius of this whole country will remain unknown to any considerable body of travelers. The Climax of Bowman and Kintla And after all, the Bowman and Kintla regions are Glacier's ultimate expression—Bowman of her beauty, Kintla of her majesty—no one who has seen the foaming cascades of Mount Peabody and a lost outlet of the lofty, bolder glacier emerging dramatically through hole in the wall fall, for all the world like a horsetail fastened upon the face of a cliff, who has looked upon the Gorg House from Brown Pass and traced the distant windings of Bowman Lake between the fluted precipice of Rainbow Peak and the fading slopes of Indian Ridge, or has looked upon the muddy monolith of Kintla Peak, rising five thousand feet from the lake in its gulf-like valley, spreading upon its shoulders, like wings prepared for flight, the broad gleaming glaciers known as Kintla and Agassi, will withhold his garden for a moment. Here again we repeat, for the hundredth or more time in our leisurely survey of the park, what the Englishman said of the spectacle of St. Mary, there is nothing like it in the world.