gle summit,
so that the necessity of relaying was avoided. One man ahead continually
calling to the dogs, eight dogs steadily pulling, and two men behind
steadily pushing, foot by foot, with many stoppages as one bench after
another was surmounted, we got the load to the top at last, a rise of
one thousand four hundred feet in less than three miles. A driving
snow-storm cut off all view and would have left us at a loss which way
to proceed but for the stakes that indicated it.

The descent was as anxious and hazardous as the ascent had been
laborious. The dogs were loosed and sent racing down the slope. With a
rope rough-lock around the sled runners, one man took the gee pole and
another the handle-bars and each spread-eagled himself through the loose
deep snow to check the momentum of the sled, until sled and men turned
aside and came to a stop in a drift to avoid a steep, smooth pitch. The
sled extricated, it was poised on the edge of the pitch and turned loose
on the hardened snow, hurtling down three or four hundred feet until it
buried itself in another drift. The dogs were necessary to drag it from
this drift, and one had to go down and bring them up. Then again they
were loosed, and from bench to bench the process was repeated until the
slope grew gentle enough to permit the regulation of the downward
progress by the foot-brake.

[Sidenote: "SUMMITS"]

The Eagle summit is one of the most difficult summits in Alaska. The
wind blows so fiercely that sometimes for days together its passage is
almost impossible. No amount of trail making could be of much help, for
the snow smothers up everything on the lee of the hill, and the end of
every storm presents a new surface and an altered route. A "summit" in
this Alaskan sense is, of course, a saddle between peaks, and in this
case there is no easier pass and no way around. The only way to avoid
the Eagle summit, without going out of the district altogether, would be
to tunnel it.

The summit passed, we found better trails and a more frequented country,
for in this district are a number of creeks that draw supplies from
Circle City, and that had been worked ten years or more.

At the time of the Klondike stampede of 1896-97, Circle City was already
established as a flourishing mining camp and boasted itself the largest
log-cabin town in the world. Before the Klondike drew away its people as
a stronger magnet draws iron filings from a lesser one, Circle had a
populat