Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/392

302 "from peak to peak, the rattling crags among." "If a squall ever strikes you, put for the first crack in the bank that you see," had been the parting injunction of the lake sailors when we started on our cruise. We observed the warning and made the best possible time to a cranny in the ill-omened "Windy Cape." And there we lay till morning, when the tumult fell as suddenly as it rose, and lake and sky smiled as serenely at each other as ever.

The chief point on the lake, for photographing, hunting, fishing, and climbing, is Railroad Creek, fifty miles up the lake. Railroad Creek comes from the "Roof of the World," having its source in the very heart of a great group of glaciers. It descends probably six thousand feet in twenty-five miles. It is swift! The fury with which it hurls logs and even boulders down its cataract bed is fairly appalling. The very earth quivers beneath its flail-like strokes.

Nowhere, perhaps, can one see more work done by rivers than here. The entire course of one of these rivers can be traced from the lake. Rising in a snow bank six thousand feet above, its route marked by a streak of foam, sometimes falling in spray hundreds of feet, then hiding behind a cliff, to burst forth in snow-white "chute," augmented by similar streams from lateral cañons, it plunges into the lake with a perfect delirium of motion. So great is the erosion that were not the lake of enormous depth, it would soon be filled with the jetsam and flotsam of the hills.

The sunset effects looking up the lake from Railroad Creek are marvellous, though, alas, the cool black and white of the photograph cannot preserve the