gain.

[Sidenote: Harper Glacier]

Before the reader turns his back upon the Grand Basin once for all, I
should like to put a name upon the glacier it contains--since it is the
fashion to name glaciers. I should like to call it the Harper Glacier,
after my half-breed companion of three years, who was the first human
being to reach the summit of the mountain. This reason might suffice,
but there is another and most interesting reason for associating the
name Harper with this mountain. Arthur Harper, Walter's father, the
pioneer of all Alaskan miners, "the first man who thought of trying the
Yukon as a mining field so far as we know," as William Ogilvie tells us
in his "Early Days on the Yukon"[5] (and none had better opportunity of
knowing than Ogilvie), was also the first man to make written reference
to this mountain, since Vancouver, the great navigator, saw it from the
head of Cook's Inlet in 1794.

Arthur Harper, in company with Al. Mayo, made the earliest exploration
of the Tanana River, ascending that stream in the summer of 1878 to
about the present site of Fairbanks; and in a letter to E. W. Nelson, of
the United States Biological Survey, then on the Alaskan coast, Harper
wrote the following winter of the "great ice mountain to the south" as
one of the most wonderful sights of the trip.[6] It is pleasant to think
that a son of his, yet unborn, was to be the first to set foot on its
top; pleasantly also the office of setting his name upon the lofty
glacier, the gleam from which caught his eye and roused his wonder
thirty years ago, falls upon one who has been glad and proud to take, in
some measure, his place.

[Sidenote: Descent]

Then began the difficulty and the danger, the toil and the anxiety, of
the descent of the ridge. Karstens led, then followed Tatum, then the
writer, and then Walter. The unbroken surface of the ridge above the
cleavage is sensationally steep, and during our absence nearly two feet
of new snow had fallen upon it. The steps that had been shovelled as we
ascended were entirely obliterated and it was necessary to shovel new
ones; it was the very heat of the day, and by the canons of climbing we
should have camped at the Pass and descended in the early morning. But
all were eager to get down, and we ventured it. Now that our task was
accomplished, our minds reverted to the boy at the base camp long
anxiously expecting us, and we thought of him and spoke of him
continually and speculat