have good opportunities to get ever-changing views of the mountain
and its wealth of creatures that bloom and breathe.

The woods differ but little from those that clothe the mountains to the
southward, the trees being slightly closer together and generally not
quite so large, marking the incipient change from the open sunny forests
of the Sierra to the dense damp forests of the northern coast, where a
squirrel may travel in the branches of the thick-set trees hundreds of
miles without touching the ground. Around the upper belt of the forest
you may see gaps where the ground has been cleared by avalanches of
snow, thousands of tons in weight, which, descending with grand rush and
roar, brush the trees from their paths like so many fragile shrubs or
grasses.

At first the ascent is very gradual. The mountain begins to leave
the plain in slopes scarcely perceptible, measuring from two to three
degrees. These are continued by easy gradations mile after mile all the
way to the truncated, crumbling summit, where they attain a steepness
of twenty to twenty-five degrees. The grand simplicity of these lines is
partially interrupted on the north subordinate cone that rises from the
side of the main cone about three thousand feet from the summit. This
side cone, past which your way to the summit lies, was active after the
breaking-up of the main ice-cap of the glacial period, as shown by the
comparatively unwasted crater in which it terminates and by streams of
fresh-looking, unglaciated lava that radiate from it as a center.

The main summit is about a mile and a half in diameter from southwest
to northeast, and is nearly covered with snow and neve, bounded by
crumbling peaks and ridges, among which we look in vain for any sure
plan of an ancient crater. The extreme summit is situated on the
southern end of a narrow ridge that bounds the general summit on the
east. Viewed from the north, it appears as an irregular blunt point
about ten feet high, and is fast disappearing before the stormy
atmospheric action to which it is subjected.

At the base of the eastern ridge, just below the extreme summit, hot
sulphurous gases and vapor escape with a hissing, bubbling noise from
a fissure in the lava. Some of the many small vents cast up a spray of
clear hot water, which falls back repeatedly until wasted in vapor. The
steam and spray seem to be produced simply by melting snow coming in the
way of the escaping gases, while the gases a