Our load was small enough now; the pity was we had not lightened it sooner. I strapped the small mail-bag to my shoulders; my comrades carried all further impedimenta, and, leaving the dead man in his icy vault we staggered into the darkness and forced an erratic track towards the Chilcoot Pass. Crater Lake was reached in two hours; I could only guess we had arrived at it by the evenness of the surface, the air was so dense that objects could not be distinguished even a few feet distant. I tried to fix a bearing by compass, but the attempt was futile, the needle swaying to all points in turn, owing to the magnetic influences around. Then we felt for the mountain-side on the left, and staggered over the blast-blown rocks and glaciers along its precipitous steeps.
As we neared the summit the howl of the blizzard increased to a shrill, piercing whistle, but we now were sheltered by the pass, and the fierce blast passed overhead. All this time we forced onward through a murky gloom with our bodies joined with ropes that we might not lose one another. At three in the afternoon I calculated that we were near the crucial point at which the final ascent can be negotiated, and we left the white shores of Crater Lake and clambered up into the rushing mists where the blizzard shrieked and moaned alternately, and hurled huge blocks of glacier ice and frozen snow down into the Crater valley. The top was reached at last, and no words of mine can describe the inferno that raged on that dread summit. We lay flat on our faces and writhed our way forward through a bubbling, foaming mass of snow and ice. Our bodies were cut and bruised with the flying débris, and our clothing was torn to rags. The blizzard had now attained an extraordinary pitch, the mountain seemed to rock and tremble with its fury, and inch by inch we crawled towards the perpendicular declivity leading to the "Scales"—full eight hundred feet of almost sheer descent. Cautiously we manœuvred across the great glacier that rests in the Devil's Cauldron—a cup-shaped hollow in the top of the notorious pass—and at once the blaze of a fire burst before our eyes, illuminating the apparently bottomless depths beyond.
The ice-field on which we lay overhung the rocks to a dangerous degree, and I realised that we must make the descent from some other part of the semicircular ridge. We crept back hurriedly, and as we stood gasping in the "cauldron" before making a détour to find a possible trail, a mighty rumbling shook the pass, and we clutched at the snow around, which flew upwards in great geyser-like columns, almost smothering us in its descending showers. The overlapping ice had plunged into the valley, carrying with it hundreds of tons of accumulated snow; we escaped the powerful suction by a few yards only.
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On the safe side of the Pass Again. Mac—Self—Stewart. |
When we approached the edge a second time a smooth, unbroken snowsteep marked the trail of the glacier, and to it we consigned ourselves, literally sliding down into the black depths. We were precipitated into an immense wreath of snow covering the scales for over a hundred feet. The fire had been blotted out with the icy deluge, but luckily, as we learned later, the fire-feeders had abandoned their post long before the avalanche had come down. Three hours later we arrived at Sheep Camp, and entered the Mascotte saloon, where the assembled miners were clustered round a huge stove in the centre of the room, listening to the ominous shriek of the gale outside.
No one dared venture out that night, but in the morning the four days' blizzard had spent itself, and we formed a party to explore the damage done. A light railway that had been laid to the Scales was completely demolished, and half down to Sheep Camp the channel of the Chilcoot River was filled with enormous ice boulders. An avalanche had also fallen on Crater Lake during the night, and when we had painfully climbed the now bare summit the frozen plateau beyond was rent for nearly a mile with enormous gashes over ten feet in width, and the ice cleavage showed down as far as the eye could reach.