ming in the river; a couple of yearling moose started from the bank
where they had been drinking as we noiselessly turned a bend; brilliant
kingfishers flitted across the water. So down these rivers we drifted,
sometimes in sunshine, sometimes in rain, until early in the morning of
the 20th June, we reached Tanana, and our journey was concluded three
months and four days after it was begun. When the telegraph office
opened at 8 o'clock a message was sent, in accordance with promise, to a
Seattle paper, and it illustrates the rapidity with which news is spread
to-day that a ship in Bering Sea, approaching Nome, received the news
from Seattle by wireless telegraph before 11 A. M. But a message from
the Seattle paper received the same morning asking for "five hundred
more words describing narrow escapes" was left unanswered, for, thank
God, there were none to describe.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Ottawa: Thorburn & Abbott, 1913, p. 87.

[6] "Mt. McKinley Region": Alfred H. Brooks, Washington, 1911, p. 25.

CHAPTER VII

THE HEIGHT OF DENALI, WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE READINGS ON THE SUMMIT
AND DURING THE ASCENT

The determination of the heights of mountains by triangulation is, of
course, the method that in general commends itself to the topographer,
though it may be questioned whether the very general use of aneroids for
barometric determinations has not thrown this latter means of measuring
altitudes into undeserved discredit when the mercurial barometer is used
instead of its convenient but unreliable substitute.

The altitude given on the present maps for Denali is the mean of
determinations made by triangulation by three different men: Muldrow on
the Sushitna[7] side in 1898, Raeburn on the Kuskokwim side in 1902, and
Porter, from the Yentna country in 1906. In addition, a determination
was made by the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1910, from points near
Cook's Inlet. "The work of the Coast Survey," writes Mr. Alfred Brooks,
"is more refined than the rough triangulation done by our men; at the
same time they were much further away." "It is a curious coincidence,"
he adds, "that the determination made by the Coast Survey was the mean
which we had assumed from our three determinations" (twenty thousand
three hundred feet).

[Sidenote: Theodolites and Barometers]

There are, however, two sources of error in the determination of the
height of this mountain by triangulation--a general one and a particular
one. The gen