thorn bushes, which give it a fine setting. Its waters, apparently
unaffected by flood or drouth, heat or cold, fall at once into white
rapids with a rush and dash, as if glad to escape from the darkness to
begin their wild course down the canyon to the plain.

Muir's Peak, a few miles to the north of the spring, rises about three
thousand feet above the plain on which it stands, and is easily
climbed. The view is very fine and well repays the slight walk to its
summit, from which much of your way about the mountain may be studied
and chosen. The view obtained of the Whitney Glacier should tempt you
to visit it, since it is the largest of the Shasta glaciers and its
lower portion abounds in beautiful and interesting cascades and
crevasses. It is three or four miles long and terminates at an
elevation of about nine thousand five hundred feet above sea level, in
moraine-sprinkled ice cliffs sixty feet high. The long gray slopes
leading up to the glacier seem remarkably smooth and unbroken. They
are much interrupted, nevertheless, with abrupt, jagged precipitous
gorges, which though offering instructive sections of the lavas for
examination, would better be shunned by most people. This may be done
by keeping well down on the base until fronting the glacier before
beginning the ascent.

The gorge through which the glacier is drained is raw-looking, deep
and narrow, and indescribably jagged. The walls in many places
overhang; in others they are beveled, loose, and shifting where the
channel has been eroded by cinders, ashes, strata of firm lavas, and
glacial drift, telling of many a change from frost to fire and their
attendant floods of mud and water. Most of the drainage of the
glacier vanishes at once in the porous rocks to reappear in springs in
the distant valley, and it is only in time of flood that the channel