The Guardians of the Columbia / Mount Hood, Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens - John H. Williams

The form and slope of Mount Adams tell of an age far greater than Mount Hood's, but its story is not, like that of Hood, the legible record of a simple volcanic cone. It wholly lacks the symmetry of such a pile. Viewed from a distance, it sits very majestically upon the summit of one of the eastern ranges of the Cascades. As we approach, however, it is seen to have little of the conical shape of Hood, still less that of graceful St. Helens, which is young and as yet practically unbroken. Its summit has been much worn down by ice or perhaps by explosions. Some of its sides are deeply indented, and all are vastly irregular in angle and markings—here a face now too steeply cut to hold a glacier, but showing old glacial scorings far down its slope; there another terraced and ribbed with waves and dikes of lava. The mountain is a long ridge rather than a round peak, and close inspection shows it to be a composite of several great cones, leaning one upon another,—the product of many craters acting in successive ages. On its ancient, scarred slopes, a hundred modern vents have added to the ruggedness and interest of the peak. Many of these blowholes built parasitic cones, from which the snows of later centuries have eroded the loose external mass, leaving only the hard lava cores upstanding like obelisks. Other vents belched out vast sheets of rock that will require a century more of weathering to make hospitable even to the sub-alpine trees most humble in their demands for soil.

"Touched by a light that hath no name,
A glory never sung,
Aloft on sky and mountain wall
Are God's great pictures hung."—Whittier.

Mazamas climbing a 40° stairway of shattered basalt, north side of Mount Adams.

Mount Adams from one of the many lakes on its southeast slope. On ridge above, near the end of Mazama glacier, a hotel is to be erected.