Chapter 18

The St. Mary picture is impossible to describe. Its colors vary with the hours and the atmosphere's changing conditions. It is silver, golden, mauve, blue, lemon, misty white, and red by turn. It is seen clearly in the morning with the sun behind you. Afternoons and sunsets offer theatrical effects, often baffling, always lovely and different. Pointed Fusillade and peaked Reynolds Mountains often lose their tops in lowering mists. So, often, does Going-to-the-Sun Mountain in the near-by right foreground. So, not so often, does keel-shaped Citadel Mountain on the near-by left; also, at times, majestic Little Chief, he of lofty mien and snow-dashed crown, and stolid Red Eagle, whose gigantic reflection reddens a mile of waters. It is these close-up monsters even more than the colorful ghosts of the Western horizon which stamp St. Mary's personality.

From the porches of the chalets and the deck of the steamer in its evening tour of the lake-end the traveller will note the enormous size of those upper valleys which once combined their glaciers as now they do their streams. He will guess that the glacier which once swept through the deep gorge in whose bottom now lies St. Mary Lake was several thousand feet in thickness. He will long to examine those upper valleys and reproduce in imagination the amazing spectacle of long ago. But they are not for him. That vision is reserved for those who ride the trails.

THE SCENIC CLIMAX OF THE SWIFTCURRENT

Again passing north, the automobile-stage reaches road's end at McDermott Lake, the fan-handle of the Swiftcurrent drainage-basin. Overlooking a magnificent part of each of its contributing valleys, the lake, itself supremely beautiful, may well deserve its reputation as Glacier's scenic centre. I have much sympathy with the thousands who claim supremacy for McDermott Lake. Lake McDonald has its wonderfully wooded shores, its majestic length and august vista; Helen Lake its unequalled wildness; Bowman Lake its incomparable view of glacier-shrouded divide. But McDermott has something of everything; it is a composite, a mosaic masterpiece with every stone a gem. There is no background from which one looks forward to "the view." Its horizon contains three hundred and sixty degrees of view. From the towering south gable of that rock-temple to God the Creator, which the map calls Mount Gould, around the circle, it offers an unbroken panorama in superlative.

In no sense by way of comparison, which is absurd between scenes so different, but merely to help realization by contrast with what is well known, let us recall the Yosemite Valley. Yosemite is a valley, Swiftcurrent an enclosure. Yosemite is gray and shining, Swiftcurrent richer far in color. Yosemite's walls are rounded, peaked, and polished, Swiftcurrent's toothed, torn, and crumbling; the setting sun shines through holes worn by frost and water in the living rock. Yosemite guards her western entrance with a shaft of gray granite rising thirty-six hundred feet from the valley floor, and her eastern end by granite domes of five thousand and six thousand feet; Swiftcurrent's rocks gather round her central lake--Altyn, thirty-two hundred feet above the lake's level; Henkel, thirty-eight hundred feet; Wilbur, forty-five hundred feet; Grinnell, four thousand; Gould, forty-seven hundred; Allen, forty-five hundred--all of colored strata, green at base, then red, then gray. Yosemite has its winding river and waterfalls, Swiftcurrent its lakes and glaciers.

Swiftcurrent has the repose but not the softness of Yosemite. Yosemite is unbelievably beautiful. Swiftcurrent inspires wondering awe.

McDermott Lake, focus point of all this natural glory, is scarcely a mile long, and narrow. It may be vivid blue and steel-blue and milky-blue, and half a dozen shades of green and pink all within twice as many minutes, according to the whim of the breeze, the changing atmosphere, and the clouding of the sun. Often it suggests nothing so much as a pool of dull-green paint. Or it may present a reversed image of mountains, glaciers, and sky in their own coloring. Or at sunset it may turn lemon or purple or crimson or orange, or a blending of all. Or, with rushing storm-clouds, it may quite suddenly lose every hint of any color, and become a study in black, white, and intermediate grays.

There are times when, from hotel porch, rock, or boat, the towering peaks and connecting limestone walls become suddenly so fairy-like that they lose all sense of reality, seeming to merge into their background of sky, from which, nevertheless, they remain sharply differentiated. The rapidity and the variety of change in the appearance of the water is nothing to that in the appearance of these magical walls and mountains. Now near, now distant; now luring, now forbidding; now gleaming as if with their own light; now gloomy in threat, they lose not their hold on the eye for a moment. The unreality of McDermott Lake, the sense it often imparts of impossibility, is perhaps its most striking feature. One suspects he dreams, awake.

THE SCENIC CIRCLE

To realize the spot as best we may, let us pause on the bridge among those casting for trout below the upper fall and glance around. To our left rises Allen Mountain, rugged, irregular, forest-clothed half-way up its forty-five hundred feet of elevation above the valley floor. Beyond it a long gigantic wall sets in at right angles, blue, shining, serrated, supporting, apparently on the lake edge, an enormous gable end of gray limestone banded with black diorite, a veritable personality comparable with Yosemite's most famous rocks. This is Mount Gould. Next is the Grinnell Glacier, hanging glistening in the air, dripping waterfalls, backgrounded by the gnawed top of the venerable Garden Wall. Then comes in turn the majestic mass of Mount Grinnell, four miles long, culminating at the lakeside in an enormous parti-colored pyramid more impressive from the hotel than even Rockwell is from Two Medicine chalets. Then, upon its right, appears a wall which is the unnamed continuation of the Garden Wall, and, plastered against the side of Swiftcurrent Mountain, three small hanging glaciers, seeming in the distance like two long parallel snow-banks. Then Mount Wilbur, another giant pyramid, gray, towering, massively carved, grandly proportioned, kingly in bearing! Again upon its right emerges still another continuation, also unnamed, of the Garden Wall, this section loftiest of all and bitten deeply by the ages. A part of it is instantly recognized from the hotel window as part of the sky-line surrounding famous Iceberg Lake. Its right is lost behind the nearer slopes of red Mount Henkel, which swings back upon our right, bringing the eye nearly to its starting-point. A glance out behind between mountains, upon the limitless lake-dotted plain, completes the scenic circle.

McDermott Lake, by which I here mean the Swiftcurrent enclosure as seen from the Many Glacier Hotel, is illustrative of all of Glacier. There are wilder spots, by far, some which frighten; there are places of nobler beauty, though as I write I know I shall deny it the next time I stand on McDermott's shores; there are supreme places which at first glance seem to have no kinship with any other place on earth. Nevertheless, McDermott contains all of Glacier's elements, all her charm, and practically all her combinations. It is the place of places to study Glacier. It is also a place to dream away idle weeks.

So he who cannot ride or walk the trails may still see and understand Glacier in her majesty. Besides the places I have mentioned he may see, from the Cut Bank Chalet, a characteristic forested valley of great beauty, and at Lewis's hotel on Lake McDonald the finest spot accessible upon the broad west side, the playground, as the east side is the show-place, of hundreds of future thousands.

So many are the short horseback trips from Many Glacier Hotel to places of significance and beauty that it is hard for the timid to withstand the temptation of the trail. Four miles will reach Grinnell Lake at the foot of its glacier, six miles will penetrate the Cracker Lake Gorge at the perpendicular base of Mount Siyeh, eight miles will disclose the astonishing spectacle of Iceberg Lake, and nine miles will cross the Swiftcurrent Pass to the Granite Park Chalet.

ICEBERG LAKE TYPICAL OF ALL

In some respects Iceberg Lake is Glacier's supreme spectacle. There are few spots so wild. There may be no easily accessible spot in the world half so wild. Imagine a horseshoe of perpendicular rock wall, twenty-seven hundred to thirty-five hundred feet high, a glacier in its inmost curve, a lake of icebergs in its centre. The back of the tower-peak of Mount Wilbur is the southern end of this horseshoe. This enclosure was not built up from below, as it looks, but bitten down within and without; it was left. On the edge of the lake in early July the sun sets at four o'clock.

Stupendous as Iceberg Lake is as a spectacle, its highest purpose is illustrative. It explains Glacier. Here by this lakeside, fronting the glacier's floating edge and staring up at the jagged top in front and on either side, one comprehends at last. The appalling story of the past seems real.

THE CLIMAX AT GRANITE PARK

It is at Granite Park that one realizes the geography of Glacier. You have crossed the continental divide and emerged upon a lofty abutment just west of it. You are very nearly in the park's centre, and on the margin of a forested canyon of impressive breadth and depth, lined on either side by mountain monsters, and reaching from Mount Cannon at the head of Lake McDonald northward to the Alberta plain. The western wall of this vast avenue is the Livingston Range. Its eastern wall is the Lewis Range. Both in turn carry the continental divide, which crosses the avenue from Livingston to Lewis by way of low-crowned Flattop Mountain, a few miles north of where you stand, and back to Livingston by way of Clements Mountain, a few miles south. Opposite you, across the chasm, rises snowy Heavens Peak. Southwest lies Lake McDonald, hidden by Heavens' shoulder. South is Logan Pass, carrying another trail across the divide, and disclosing hanging gardens beyond on Reynolds' eastern slope. Still south of that, unseen from here, is famous Gunsight Pass.

It is a stirring spectacle. But wait. A half-hour's climb to the summit of Swiftcurrent Mountain close at hand (the chalet is most of the way up, to start with) and all of Glacier lies before you like a model in relief. Here you see the Iceberg Cirque from without and above. The Belly River chasm yawns enormously. Mount Cleveland, monarch of the region, flaunts his crown of snow among his near-by court of only lesser monsters. The Avenue of the Giants deeply splits the northern half of the park, that land of extravagant accent, mysterious because so little known; the Glacier of tourists lying south. A marvellous spectacle, this, indeed, and one which clears up many misconceptions. The Canadian Rockies hang on the misty northern horizon, the Montana plains float eastward, the American Rockies roll south and west.

OVER GUNSIGHT PASS

To me one of the most stirring sights in all Glacier is the view of Gunsight Pass from the foot of Gunsight Lake. The immense glaciered uplift of Mount Jackson on the south of the pass, the wild whitened sides of Gunsight Mountain opposite dropping to the upturned strata of red shale at the water's edge, the pass itself--so well named--perched above the dark precipice at the lake's head, the corkscrew which the trail makes up Jackson's perpendicular flank and its passage across a mammoth snow-bank high in air--these in contrast with the silent black water of the sunken lake produce ever the same thrill however often seen. The look back, too, once the pass is gained, down St. Mary's gracious valley to Going-to-the-Sun Mountain and its horizon companions! Sun Mountain (for short), always a personality, is never from any other point of view so undeniably the crowned majesty as from Gunsight Pass. And finally, looking forward, which in this speaking means westward, the first revelation of Lake Ellen Wilson gives a shock of awed astonishment whose memory can never pass.

Truly, Gunsight is a pass of many sensations, for, leaving Lake Ellen Wilson and its eighteen hundred feet of vertical frothing outlet, the westward trail crosses the shoulder of Lincoln Peak to the Sperry Glacier and its inviting chalet (where the biggest hoary marmot I ever saw sat upon my dormitory porch), and, eight miles farther down the mountain, beautiful Lake McDonald.

DESTINY OF THE WEST SIDE

Although it was settled earlier, Glacier's west side is less developed than its east side; this because, for the most part, its scenery is less sensational though no less gorgeously beautiful. Its five long lakes, of which McDonald is much the longest and largest, head up toward the snowy monsters of the divide; their thin bodies wind leisurely westward among superbly forested slopes. Its day is still to come. It is the land of the bear, the moose, the deer, the trout, and summer leisure. Its destiny is to become Glacier's vacation playground.

THE COMING SPLENDORS OF THE NORTH

The wild north side of Glacier, its larger, bigger-featured, and occasionally greater part, is not yet for the usual tourist; for many years from this writing, doubtless, none will know it but the traveller with tent and pack-train. He alone, and may his tribe increase, will enjoy the gorgeous cirques and canyons of the Belly River, the wild quietude of the Waterton Valley, the regal splendors of Brown Pass, and the headwater spectacles of the Logging, Quartz, Bowman, and Kintla valleys. He alone will realize that here is a land of greater power, larger measures, and bigger horizons.

And yet with Kintla comes climax. Crossing the border the mountains subside, the glaciers disappear. Canada's Waterton Lakes Park begins at our climax and merges in half a dozen miles into the great prairies of Alberta. It is many miles northwest before the Canadian Rockies assume proportions of superlative scenic grandeur.

THE BELLY RIVER VALLEYS

To realize the growing bigness of the land northward one has only to cross the wall from Iceberg Lake into the Belly River canyon. "Only," indeed! In 1917 it took us forty miles of detour outside the park, even under the shadow of Chief Mountain, to cross the wall from Iceberg Lake, the west-side precipice of which is steeper even than the east. The Belly River drainage-basin is itself bigger, and its mountains bulk in proportion. Eighteen glaciers contribute to the making of perhaps as many lakes. The yellow mountains of its northern slopes invade Canada. The borders of its principal valley are two monster mountains, Cleveland, the greatest in the park for mass and height and intricate outline; the other, Merritt, in some respects the most interesting of Glacier's abundant collection of majestic peaks.

There are three valleys. The North Fork finds its way quickly into Canada. The Middle Fork rises in a group of glaciers high under the continental divide and descends four giant steps, a lake upon each step, to two greater lakes of noble aspect in the valley bottom. The South Fork emerges from Helen Lake deep in the gulf below the Ahern Glacier across the Garden Wall from Iceberg Lake. Between the Middle and South Forks Mount Merritt rises 9,944 feet in altitude, minareted like a mediaeval fort and hollow as a bowl, its gaping chasm hung with glaciers.

This is the valley of abundance. The waters are large, their trout many and vigorous; the bottoms are extravagantly rich in grasses and flowers; the forests are heavy and full-bodied; there is no open place, even miles beyond its boundaries, which does not offer views of extraordinary nobility. Every man who enters it becomes enthusiastically prophetic of its future. After all, the Belly River country is easily visited. A leisurely horseback journey from McDermott, that is all; three days among the strange yellow mountains of the over thrust's eastern edge, including two afternoons among the fighting trout of Kennedy Creek and Slide Lake, and two nights in camp among the wild bare arroyos of the Algonkian invasion of the prairie--an interesting prelude to the fulness of wilderness life to come.

I dwell upon the Belly valleys because their size, magnificence, and accessibility suggest a future of public use; nothing would be easier, for instance, than a road from Babb to join the road already in from Canada. The name naturally arouses curiosity. Why Belly? Was it not the Anglo-Saxon frontier's pronunciation of the Frenchman's original Belle? The river, remember, is mainly Canadian. Surely in all its forks and tributaries it was and is the Beautiful River.

THE AVENUE OF THE GIANTS

The Avenue of the Giants looms in any forecast of Glacier's future. It really consists of two valleys joined end on at their beginnings on Flattop Mountain; McDonald Creek flowing south, Little Kootenai flowing north. The road which will replace the present trail up this avenue from the much-travelled south to Waterton Lake and Canada is a matter doubtless of a distant future, but it is so manifestly destiny that it must be accepted as the key to the greater Glacier to come. Uniting at its southern end roads from both sides of the divide, it will reach the Belly valleys by way of Ahern Pass, the Bowman and Kintla valleys by way of Brown Pass, and will terminate at the important tourist settlement which is destined to grow at the splendid American end of Waterton Lake. Incidentally it will become an important motor-highway between Canada and America. Until then, though all these are now accessible by trail, the high distinction of the Bowman and the Kintla valleys' supreme expression of the glowing genius of this whole country will remain unknown to any considerable body of travellers.

THE CLIMAX OF BOWMAN AND KINTLA

And, after all, the Bowman and Kintla regions are Glacier's ultimate expression, Bowman of her beauty, Kintla of her majesty. No one who has seen the foaming cascades of Mount Peabody and a lost outlet of the lofty Boulder Glacier emerging dramatically through Hole-in-the-Wall Fall, for all the world like a horsetail fastened upon the face of a cliff, who has looked upon the Guardhouse from Brown Pass and traced the distant windings of Bowman Lake between the fluted precipice of Rainbow Peak and the fading slopes of Indian Ridge; or has looked upon the mighty monolith of Kintla Peak rising five thousand feet from the lake in its gulf-like valley, spreading upon its shoulders, like wings prepared for flight, the broad gleaming glaciers known as Kintla and Agassiz, will withhold his guerdon for a moment.

Here again we repeat, for the hundredth or more time in our leisurely survey of the park, what the Englishman said of the spectacle of St. Mary: "There is nothing like it in the world."

XIV

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE

MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK, SOUTHWESTERN COLORADO. AREA, 77 SQUARE MILES

I

Many years, possibly centuries, before Columbus discovered America, a community of cliff-dwellers inhabiting a group of canyons in what is now southwestern Colorado entirely disappeared.

Many generations before that, again possibly centuries, the founders of this community, abandoning the primitive pueblos of their people elsewhere, had sought new homes in the valleys tributary to the Mancos River. Perhaps they were enterprising young men and women dissatisfied with the poor and unprogressive life at home. Perhaps they were dissenters from ancient religious forms, outcasts and pilgrims, for there is abundant evidence that the prehistoric sun-worshippers of our southwest were deeply religious, and human nature is the same under skins of all colors in every land and age. More likely they were merely thrifty pioneers attracted to the green cedar-grown mesas by the hope of better conditions.

Whatever the reason for their pilgrimage, it is a fair inference that, like our own Pilgrim Fathers, they were sturdy of body and progressive of spirit, for they had a culture which their descendants carried beyond that of other tribes and communities of prehistoric people in America north of the land of the Aztecs.

Beginning with modest stone structures of the usual cliff-dwellers' type built in deep clefts in the mesa's perpendicular cliff, safe from enemies above and below, these enterprising people developed in time a complicated architecture of a high order; they advanced the arts beyond the practice of their forefathers and their neighbors; they herded cattle upon the mesas; they raised corn and melons in clearings in the forests, and watered their crops in the dry seasons by means of simple irrigation systems as soundly scientific, so far as they went, as those of to-day; outgrowing their cliff homes, they invaded the neighboring mesas, where they built pueblos and more ambitious structures.

Then, apparently suddenly, for they left behind them many of their household goods, and left unfinished an elaborate temple to their god, the sun, they vanished. There is no clew to the reason or the manner of their going.

Meantime European civilization was pushing in all directions. Columbus discovered America; De Soto explored the southeast and ascended the Mississippi; Cortez pushed into Mexico and conquered the Aztecs; Spanish priests carried the gospel north and west from the Antilles to the continent; Raleigh sent explorers to Virginia; the Pilgrim Fathers landed in Massachusetts; the white man pushed the Indian aside, and at last the European pioneer sought a precarious living on the sands of the southwest.

One December day in 1888 Richard and Alfred Wetherill hunted lost cattle on the top of one of the green mesas north and west of the Mancos River. They knew this mesa well. Many a time before had they rounded up their herds and stalked the deer among the thin cedar and pinyon forests. Often, doubtless, in their explorations of the broad Mancos Valley below, they had happened upon ruins of primitive isolated or grouped stone buildings hidden by sage-brush, half buried in rock and sand. No doubt, around their ranch fire, they had often speculated concerning the manner of men that had inhabited these lowly structures so many years before that sometimes aged cedars grew upon the broken walls.

But this December day brought the Wetherills the surprise of their uneventful lives. Some of the cattle had wandered far, and the search led to the very brink of a deep and narrow canyon, across which, in a long deep cleft under the overhang of the opposite cliff, they saw what appeared to be a city. Those who have looked upon the stirring spectacle of Cliff Palace from this point can imagine the astonishment of these ranchmen.