Of these "happy hunting grounds," as Browne chapters the park country in his book, Stephen R. Capps of the United States Geological Survey says in his report:
"Probably no part of America is so well supplied with wild game, unprotected by reserves, as the area on the north slope of the Alaska Range, west of the Nanana River. This region has been so little visited by white men that the game herds have, until recent years, been little molested by hunters. The white mountain sheep are particularly abundant in the main Alaska Range, and in the more rugged foothills. Caribou are plentiful throughout the entire area, and were seen in bands numbering many hundred individuals. Moose are numerous in the lowlands, and range over all the area in which timber occurs. Black bears may be seen in or near timbered lands, and grizzly bears range from the rugged mountains to the lowlands. Rabbits and ptarmigan are at times remarkably numerous."
Parker and Browne camped along the Muldrow Glacier, now a magnificent central feature of the park. Then they made for McKinley summit. Striking the Denali Glacier, they ascended it with a dog train to an altitude of eleven thousand feet, where they made a base camp and went on afoot, packing provisions and camp outfit on their backs. At one place they ascended an incoming glacier over ice cascades, four thousand feet high. From their last camp they cut steps in the ice for more than three thousand feet of final ascent, and attained the top on July 1 in the face of a blizzard. On the northeastern end of the level summit, and only five minutes' walk from the little hillock which forms the supreme summit, the blizzard completely blinded them. It was impossible to go on, and to wait meant rapid death by freezing; with extreme difficulty they returned to their camp. Two days later they made a second attempt, but were again enveloped in an ice storm that rendered progress impossible. Exhaustion of supplies forbade another try, and saved their lives, for a few days later a violent earthquake shook McKinley to its summit. Later on Mr. Browne identified this earthquake as concurrent with the terrific explosive eruption which blew off the top of Mount Katmai, on the south coast of Alaska.
The following spring the Stuck-Karstens party made the summit upon that rarest of occasions with Mount McKinley, a perfect day. Archdeacon Stuck describes the "actual summit" as "a little crater-like snow basin, sixty or sixty-five feet long, and twenty to twenty-five feet wide, with a hay-cock of snow at either end—the south one a little higher than the north." Ignoring official and recognized nomenclature, and calling McKinley and Foraker by their Kuskokwim Indian names, he writes of Mount Foraker: "Denali's Wife does not appear at all save from the actual summit of Denali, for she is completely hidden by his South Peak, until the moment when his South Peak is surmounted. And never was nobler sight displayed to man than that great isolated mountain spread out completely, with all its spurs and ridges, its cliffs and its glaciers, lofty and mighty, and yet far beneath us."
"Above us," he writes a few pages later, "the sky took on a blue so deep that none of us had ever gazed upon a midday sky like it before. It was deep, rich, lustrous, transparent blue, as dark as Prussian blue, but intensely blue; a hue so strange, so increasingly impressive, that to one at least it 'seemed like special news of God,' as a new poet sings. We first noticed the darkening tint of the upper sky in the Grand Basin, and it deepened as we rose. Tyndall observed and discussed this phenomenon in the Alps, but it seems scarcely to have been mentioned since."
A couple of months before the Parker-Browne party started for the top, there was an ascent of the lower North Peak which, for sheer daring and endurance must rank high in the history of adventure. Four prospectors and miners from the Kantishna region organized by Tom Lloyd, took advantage of the hard ice of May, and an idle dog team, to make for the summit. Their motive seems to have been little more than to plant a pole where it could be seen by telescope, as they thought, from Fairbanks; that was why they chose the North Peak. They used no ropes, alpenstocks, or scientific equipment of any sort, and carried only one camera, the chance possession of McGonagall.
From a photograph by G.B. Gordon