ring, rises about three
thousand feet above the plain on which it stands, and is easily climbed.
The view is very fine and well repays the slight walk to its summit,
from which much of your way about the mountain may be studied and
chosen. The view obtained of the Whitney Glacier should tempt you to
visit it, since it is the largest of the Shasta glaciers and its lower
portion abounds in beautiful and interesting cascades and crevasses. It
is three or four miles long and terminates at an elevation of about nine
thousand five hundred feet above sea level, in moraine-sprinkled ice
cliffs sixty feet high. The long gray slopes leading up to the glacier
seem remarkably smooth and unbroken. They are much interrupted,
nevertheless, with abrupt, jagged precipitous gorges, which though
offering instructive sections of the lavas for examination, would better
be shunned by most people. This may be done by keeping well down on the
base until fronting the glacier before beginning the ascent.

The gorge through which the glacier is drained is raw-looking, deep and
narrow, and indescribably jagged. The walls in many places overhang; in
others they are beveled, loose, and shifting where the channel has
been eroded by cinders, ashes, strata of firm lavas, and glacial drift,
telling of many a change from frost to fire and their attendant floods
of mud and water. Most of the drainage of the glacier vanishes at once
in the porous rocks to reappear in springs in the distant valley, and it
is only in time of flood that the channel carries much water; then there
are several fine falls in the gorge, six hundred feet or more in height.
Snow lies in it the year round at an elevation of eight thousand five
hundred feet, and in sheltered spots a thousand feet lower. Tracing this
wild changing channel-gorge, gully, or canyon, the sections will show
Mount Shasta as a huge palimpsest, containing the records, layer upon
layer, of strangely contrasted events in its fiery-icy history. But
look well to your footing, for the way will test the skill of the most
cautious mountaineers.

Regaining the low ground at the base of the mountain and holding on in
your grand orbit, you pass through a belt of juniper woods, called "The
Cedars," to Sheep Rock at the foot of the Shasta Pass. Here you strike
the old emigrant road, which leads over the low divide to the eastern
slopes of the mountain. In a north-northwesterly direction from the foot
of the pass you may