Nisqually Canyon.
... "Where the mountain wall
Is piled to heaven, and through the narrow rift
Of the vast rocks, against whose rugged feet
Beats the mad torrent with perpetual roar:
Where noonday is as twilight, and the wind
Comes burdened with the everlasting moan
Of forests and far-off waterfalls."—Whittier.
Yonder, in the southeast, towering above the lower shadows of harbor and hills, rose a vast pyramid of soft flame. The setting sun had thrown a mantle of rose pink over the ice of the glaciers and the great cleavers of rock which buttress the mighty dome. The rounded summit was warm with beautiful orange light. Soon the colors upon its slope changed to deeper reds, and then to amethyst, and violet, and pearl gray. The sun-forsaken ranges below fell away to dark neutral tints. But the fires upon the crest burned on, deepening from gold to burnished copper, a colossal beacon flaming high against the sunset purple of the eastern skies. Finally, even this great light paled to a ghostly white, as the supporting foundation of mountain ridges dropped into the darkness of the long northern twilight, until the snowy summit seemed no longer a part of earth, but a veil of uncanny mist, caught up by the winds from the Pacific and floating far above the black sky-line of the solid Cascades, that
* * * heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared
Between the East and West.
North Peak, or Liberty Cap, and South Mowich Glacier in storm, seen from an altitude of 6,000 feet, on ridge between South Mowich and Puyallup Glaciers. The glacier, 2,000 feet below, is nearly half a mile wide. Note the tremendous wall of ice in which it ends.
Copyright, 1900, By A. H. Waite.
Basaltic Columns, part of the "Colonnade" on south side of South Mowich Glacier. These curious six-sided columns of volcanic rock are similar to those bordering the Cowlitz Glacier.
Copyright, 1900, By A. H. Waite.