This rim you stand upon is very narrow; a hundred feet wide, sometimes less, between the cliff that rises 2,000 feet above the glacier and the descent of a thousand feet on the other side. Snow lies upon part of this slope; stones, started from the edge, leap in lengthening bounds over its firm surface and plunge with a splash into the throat of the lakelet that lies in the amphitheater. The ice slope, dipping into the clear water, passes from purest white to deepest blue as it passes out of sight in the depths of the basin.
A two days' visit to this trackless region sufficed only to see a small part of the magnificent scenery. White River Cañon, the cliffs of Ragged Spur, the northern slope of Mount Tacoma, where the climber is always tempted upward, might occupy him for weeks. Across the snow fields, where Milk Creek rises, is the glacier of the North Fork of the Puyallup, and the end of the horse trail we left at Carbon River is within six miles of its base. When a trail is built up Carbon River, the way across this divide will be found, and, with comfortable stopping places on the two rivers, the tourist can pass a delightful week amid scenery we now cross the ocean to Switzerland to see.
Major Edward Sturgis Ingraham.
X. DISCOVERY OF CAMP MUIR, 1888
By MAJOR E. S. INGRAHAM
Major Edward Sturgis Ingraham has visited the mountain annually since 1888. He has ascended to the summit seven times and has spent as many nights in the crater. It was he who gave to a number of the prominent features of the Park their beautiful and enduring names.
On his first ascent in 1888 the party included John Muir, most famous naturalist of the Pacific Slope. Since he found a sheltered pumice patch and suggested camping there for the night, Major Ingraham called it Camp Muir, now well known to all climbers.
Major Ingraham prepared an account of the ascent which was published in The Puget Sound Magazine for October, 1888. That magazine has long since ceased to be issued. It was edited by the editor of this present work, who has rescued the article from the rare and almost forgotten files.
After an extensive career as superintendent of schools, printer, militia officer and miner, Major Ingraham has been devoting his later years to the boy scout work, in which his love for the mountains plays an important part.
A glacier on the mountain bears the name of Ingraham. How that came to be, is related by him as follows: "One time when I was on the mountain encamped at the Camp of the Clouds, Professor I. C. Russell and another man, both in their shirt sleeves, came tottering into my camp at early morning. They had been caught upon the summit and had spent a shivering night in the crater. I treated them the best I knew how and they departed. When their maps came out I found that a beautiful glacier had been named for me—Ingraham Glacier."
Mount Rainier, one of Nature's masterpieces, is the most striking object of grandeur and beauty amidst the unsurpassed scenery of Washington Territory. Occupying nearly a central position geographically in the Territory, it is alike an object of pride to the inhabitants of the Great Plain of the Columbia and to the dwellers on Puget Sound. There are other peaks that command our attention, but it is to the old monarch that we turn with unfeigned pride and exclaim, "Behold a masterpiece!"