tion: Climbers preparing for a night at Camp Muir (altitude
10,000 feet), in order to get an early start for the summit. This is
on the Cowlitz Cleaver, below Gibraltar. John Muir, the famous
mountain climber, selected this spot as a camp in 1888. A stout cabin
should be built here to shelter climbers.]

[Illustration: The Bee-Hive, a landmark on Cowlitz Cleaver, below
Gibraltar.]

In its dimensions, however, it is still one of the world's great
peaks. The Rainier National Park, eighteen miles square--as large as
many counties in the East--has an elevation along its western and
lowest boundary averaging four thousand feet above sea level. Assuming
a diameter for the peak of only twenty miles, the {p.081} area
occupied by this creature of a volcano exceeds three hundred square
miles. Of its vast surface upwards of 32,500 acres, or about fifty-one
square miles, are covered by glaciers or the fields of perpetual snow
which feed them. A straight line drawn through from the end of North
Tahoma glacier, on the west side, to the end of White glacier, on the
east, would be thirteen miles long. The circumference of the crest on
the 10,000-foot contour is nearly seven miles. Its glacial system is,
and doubtless has long been, the most extensive on the continent,
south of Alaska; it is said by scientists to outrank that of any
mountain in Europe. The twelve primary glaciers vary in length from
three to eight miles, and from half a mile to three miles in width.
There are nearly as many "interglaciers," or smaller ice streams which
gather their snow supply, not from the neve fields of the summit, but
within the wedges of rock which the greater glaciers have left
pointing upward on the higher slopes.

[Illustration: Mazama Club on Cowlitz Chimneys, looking across the
ice-stream of the Cowlitz Glacier.]

[Illustration: Climbing Cowlitz Cleaver to Gibraltar. This hacked and
weather-worn spine left by the glaciers forms one wing of a great
inverted V, with Gibraltar as its apex. On the other side of it is a
drop of several thousand feet to Nisqually Glacier.]

The geological story may be told in a few untechnical words. As those
folds in the earth's crust which parallel the coast were slowly formed
by the lateral pressure of sea upon land, fractures often occurred in
the general incline thus {p.082} created. Through the fissures that
resulted the subterranean fires thrust molten rock. In many cases, the
expulsion was of sufficient