Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/83

Rh while an elevation of 8,000 feet leaves more than a fourth of the atmosphere below it. The situation was one of remarkable natural beauty. On the east there was little to mark the altitude except the rocky soil and scanty vegetation; on the north there were picturesque piles of granite; on the north-west lay the Laramie Hills; from the northwest to the south towered the mountain-peaks, many of them covered with perpetual snow. Long's Peak and Gray's Peak were 60 miles away at the south; the great mass of Medicine Bow lay at the west, and between them, over the lower ridges, rose some of the high mountains of the Colorado parks.

The party being located, and all arrangements for observation being made as systematic as possible, work was carried on during the summer months in earnest, and attended with valuable results for the initiatory movement of a work of such magnitude. The weather proved to be unusually unfavorable. An old trapper, who had lived among the mountains for twenty years, said that the amount of cloudy and rainy weather was uncommon for the season. With the exception of a week, when every night and a greater part of ever day were fine, clear nights were rare, and clear days less so. There were but two afternoons when work upon the sun could be kept up from noon till sunset, though there were more than twenty cloudless mornings during the same time. The enormous snow-fall of the preceding winter accounted for the unusual weather-condition of the locality, and the snow, in the middle of July, was still lying to the depths of eight feet on the plateau at the base of the Medicine Bow Mount.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, valuable scientific results were obtained in five different departments of observation, geographical, meteorological, telescopic, spectroscopic, and magnetic.

The geographical position of the station was completely determined, its longitude being obtained by telegraphic communication with Salt Lake City. It will, therefore, be for the future a reference-point and base for the numerous surveys which are being made in that part of the country.

A complete hourly meteorological record was obtained for nearly the whole of the months of June, July, and August, which, from the important position of the station, cannot fail to be of great interest and value.

The telescopic observations were full of promise for the result of future and more thorough work in that department. When the sky was unclouded the atmosphere possessed the most ethereal transparency. At night, myriads of stars invisible at lower elevations were plainly discernible. Nearly all the seventh-magnitude stars of the British Association Catalogue were clearly visible to the naked eye. Prof. Young, to whose report we are indebted for the facts recorded in this article, says that, in the quadrilateral forming the bowl of the "Dipper," he could see distinctly nine stars, with glimpses of one or