I asked myself, How was this colossal work performed? Who chiseled these mighty and picturesque masses out of a mere protuberance of earth? And the answer was at hand. Ever young, ever mighty, with the vigor of a thousand worlds still within him, the real sculptor was even then climbing up the eastern sky. It was he who planted the glaciers on the mountain slopes, thus giving gravity a plough to open out the valleys; and it is he who, acting through the ages, will finally lay low these mighty monuments, * * * so that the people of an older earth may see mould spread and corn wave over the hidden rocks which at this moment bear the weight of the Jungfrau.—John Tyndall: "Hours of Exercise in the Alps."
The life of a glacier is one eternal grind.—John Muir.
Our stately Mountain, in its youth, was as comely and symmetrical a cone as ever graced the galaxy of volcanic peaks. To-day, while still young as compared with the obelisk crags of the Alps, it has already taken on the venerable and deeply-scarred physiognomy of a veteran. It is no longer merely an overgrown boy among the hills, but, cut and torn by the ice of centuries, it is fast assuming the dignity and interest of a patriarch of the mountains.
Reflection Lake, below Pinnacle Peak and the Mountain.
Copyright, 1897, By E. S. Curtis.
To some, no doubt, the smooth, youthful contours of an active volcano seem more beautiful than the rugged grandeur of the Weisshorn. The perfect cone of Mt. St. Helens, until recently in eruption, pleases them more than the broad dome of Mt. Adams, rounded by an explosion in the unknown past. But for those who love nature and the story written upon its face, mountains have character as truly as men, and they show it in their features as clearly.
Looking up from Cowlitz Chimneys to Gibraltar and the summit. 1, Crater and Columbia's Crest. 2, Peak Success. 3, Upper snow fields of Nisqually Glacier. 4, Gibraltar Rock. 5, Cowlitz Cleaver. 6, Cathedral Rocks. 7, Little Tahoma. 8, Cowlitz Glacier. 9, Ingraham Glacier, emptying into the Cowlitz.