Identifier: glimpsesofournat01unit (find matches)
Title: Glimpses of our national parks
Year: 1920 (1920s)
Authors: United States. National Park Service Yard, Robert Sterling, 1861-1945
Subjects: National parks and reserves
Publisher: Washington, Govt. Print. Off.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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tingfrom south to north, are Mount Shasta in California; Mount Hood inOregon; INIount St. Helens, Mount Adams, Mount Rainier, andMount Baker in Washington. Once, in the dim ages when Americawas making, they blazed across the sea like huge beacons. To-day,their fires quenched, they suggest a stalwart band of Knights of theAges, helmeted in snow, armored in ice, standing at parade upon acarpet patterned gorgeously in wild flowers. Easily chief of this knightly band is Mount Rainier, a giant tower-ing 14,408 feet above tidewater in Puget Sound. Home-boundsailors far at sea mend their courses from his silver summit. Travel-ers overland catch the sun glint from his shining sides at a distance«cf more than 150 miles. OUR NATIONAL. PARKS. 29 This mountain has a glacier system far exceeding in size and im-pressive beauty that of any other in tlie United States. From itssummit and cirques 28 named rivers of ice pour slowly down itssides. There are others unnamed. Seen upon the map, as if from
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Photograph by llerberl \\. Gkasou. Tehipite Dome, Proposed Roosevelt National Paek. It rises abruptly more than 3,000 feet above the floor of Tehipite Valley. 30 OUR NATIOISTAL. PAKKS. an aeroplane, one thinks of it as an enormous frozen octopus stretch-ing icy tentacles clown upon every side among the rich gardens ofwild flowers and splendid forests of fir and cedars below„ BIRTH OF THE GLACIERS Every winter the moisture-laden winds from the Pacific, suddenlycooled against its summit, deposit upon its top and sides enormoussnows. These, settling in the mile-wide crater which was left aftera great explosion in some prehistoric age carried away perhaps 2,000feet of the volcanos former height, press with overwhelming weightdown the mountains sloping sides. Thus are born the glaciers, for the snow under its own pressurequickly hardens into ice. Through 28 valleys, self-carved in thesolid rock, flow these rivers of ice, as they may be roughly called,now turning, as rivers of water turn,

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