Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/411

Rh. To the east the water flows to Lake Chelan, thence to the Columbia, and thence to the Pacific by a journey of six hundred miles. To the west the water descends through the Sauk and the Skagit to Puget Sound, only a hundred and fifty miles away. This pass is almost always wrapped in clouds, and it is fittingly known as Cloudy Pass. The masses of warm vapour rising from the Pacific are hurled against the icy crowns of Glacier Peak, Mt. Nixon, Mt. Le Conte, North Star Peak, Bonanza Peak, and the rest of the wintry brotherhood, most not yet even named, and make of them a genuine "patriam nimborum" in Virgil's phrase.

This is the breeding place of tempests. We had just reached the pass on one occasion, with a smiling sky below, and were just getting our cameras ready to catch the westward maze of peaks, when almost instantly there began to wheel and whirl above us great cloud-masses, seemingly from nowhere, formed right there, in fact, and before we had time to think, we were wrapped in a furious blizzard. With difficulty, benumbed, drenched, and exhausted, we managed to pick our way to camp, four miles below. This was in the early part of August. To be caught in a Chelan snowstorm is a serious matter at any time, and later in the year, may be all a man's life is worth.

But the greatest sight, the crowning feature, of all this panorama of sublimities is Glacier Peak seen from Cloudy Pass. This is pre-eminently the storm-king, the "Cloud-Compeller" (Nephelegereta, in the sounding word of Homer), and rarely can one catch an unobstructed view of its glistening cone. After much watching and waiting we caught the base and