enown of being
smart," and it may live. One is thankful, however, that it is unique in
the literature of travel.

[Sidenote: Cook's Second Attempt]

Three years later Doctor Cook organized an expedition for a second
attempt upon the mountain. In May, 1906, accompanied by Professor
Herschel Parker, Mr. Belmore Browne, a topographer named Porter, who
made some valuable maps, and packers, the party landed at the head of
Cook's Inlet and penetrated by motor-boat and by pack-train into the
Sushitna country, south of the range. Failing to cross the range at the
head of the Yentna, they spent some time in explorations along the
Kahilitna River, and, finding no avenue of approach to the heights of
the mountain, the party returned to Cook's Inlet and broke up.

With only one companion, a packer named Edward Barrille, Cook returned
in the launch up the Chulitna River to the Tokositna late in August. "We
had already changed our mind as to the impossibility of climbing the
mountain," he writes. Ascending a glacier which the Tokositna River
drains, named by Cook the Ruth Glacier, they reached the amphitheatre at
the glacier head. From this point, "up and up to the heaven-scraped
granite of the top," Doctor Cook grows grandiloquent and vague, for at
this point his true narrative ends.

[Illustration: Approaching the range.]

The claims that Doctor Cook made upon his return are well known, but it
is quite impossible to follow his course from the description given in
his book, "To the Top of the Continent." This much may be said: from the
summit of the mountain, on a clear day, it seemed evident that no ascent
was possible from the south side of the range at all. That was the
judgment of all four members of our party. Doctor Cook talks about "the
heaven-scraped granite of the top" and "the dazzling whiteness of the
frosted granite blocks," and prints a photograph of the top showing
granite slabs. There is no rock of any kind on the South (the higher)
Peak above nineteen thousand feet. The last one thousand five hundred
feet of the mountain is all permanent snow and ice; nor is the
conformation of the summit in the least like the photograph printed as
the "top of Mt. McKinley." In his account of the view from the summit he
speaks of "the ice-blink caused by the extensive glacial sheets north of
the Saint Elias group," which would surely be out of the range of any
possible vision, but does not mention at all the master sight that
b