Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/22

12. A limited number of cattle and horses have also found their way over the summit of the Chilkoot Pass—some crossing immediately after us—but the trail is too steep on the ocean side to fit it for animal service, although I strongly suspect that were the location in Mexico instead of in Alaska, there would be a goodly number of caballeros and arrieros to smile at the proposition of presented difficulties. Indian women seem to consider it no hardship to pack a fifty-pound sack of flour and more over the summit, and there are many men who do not hesitate to take double this load, and make several journeys during the same day. It is the load that kills, and it was, doubtless, this influence, united to a cruel method, which so strongly impressed the pioneers with the notion of extreme hardship. The most level and perfect road, to one carrying for miles a pack of from sixty to eighty pounds, soon begins to loom up a steep incline.

Both the northern and southern slopes of the Chilkoot Pass are largely surfaced with shattered rocks, over which, with occasional deflections across more pleasant snow banks, a fairly well-defined trail mounts on either side to the summit. In its grim landscape effects, more particularly on the inner face, where a number of rock-bound tarns—Crater Lake, Long Lake, Deep Lake—afford a certain relief to the degree of desolation which the scene carries, it reminded me much of the famous Grimsel Pass, and here as well as there the modeling of the surface through glacial action was strongly in evidence. The vastly towering Alpine peaks were, however, wanting, and the glaciers that still appeared showed that they had long since passed their better days. The actual summit is trenched by a narrow rocky gap, roughly worn through walls of granite, and by it have passed the thousands who have pressed to the interior. There is no timber growth at or near this summit, nor is there soil sufficient to give support to an arboreal vegetation. Nearest to the top line a prostrate form of scrubby hemlock (Tsuga Pattoniana) alone makes pretense to being a tree, but below it of itself grows to majestic proportions, and about "Sheep Camp," with Menzie's spruce, a birch, and Cottonwood (Populus balsamifera), forms part of the beautiful woodland, which with ever-increasing freshness descends to the lower levels.

Lest I be accused of too freely seeing the beauties of the northern landscape, I venture in my defense the following graphic description of the Dyea Valley from the pen of another traveler and geologist, Prof. Israel Russell: "In the valley of the Taiya the timber line is sharply drawn along the bordering cliffs at an elevation of about twenty-five hundred feet. Above that height the mountain sides are stern and rugged; below is a dense forest of gigantic hemlocks, festooned with long streamers of moss, which grows even more