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On Saturday, the 25th of February, after climbing a rather stiff hill, we passed temporarily out of Yukon into Kuskokwim waters, for the tributaries of these two great drainage systems interlock in these hills.
Eight miles in two days was certainly very poor travel, and at this rate our supplies would never take us down to the forks of the Kuskokwim. Yet there was no other way in which we could proceed. The weather was exceedingly mild, too mild for comfort the thermometer ranging from 20° to 25° above and the dogs felt the unseasonable warmth.
Though not an unique experience, it is rare to be wet with rain on the winter trail rarer in the interior probably than on the coast. Once since on the Kuskokwim and once on the Fortymile it has happened to me in seven winters' travel. We pushed on for thirty miles, past several little native villages, until we came to Whaleback, a village part Esquimau and part Indian.
And if on any such fundamental the battle gauge is thrown down, he must take it up and fight the quarrel out at whatever cost. We left Iditarod City on Monday, the 20th of March, the dogs the fatter and fresher for their week's rest, resolved not to return by the Kuskokwim but to take the beaten trail out to the Yukon, and so all the way up that stream to Fort Yukon.
The rugged, broken country, with small, rounded domes of hills, stretched away in all directions, a maze of little valleys threading in and out amongst them. The Bonanza Creek road-house was by far the best of any between the Kuskokwim and the Iditarod, and showed what can be done for comfort, even under adverse circumstances, by a couple who care and try.
The altitude given on the present maps for Denali is the mean of determinations made by triangulation by three different men: Muldrow on the Sushitna side in 1898, Raeburn on the Kuskokwim side in 1902, and Porter, from the Yentna country in 1906. In addition, a determination was made by the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1910, from points near Cook's Inlet.
On that spot one understood why the view of Denali from Lake Minchúmina is the grand view, for the west face drops abruptly down with nothing but that vast void from the top to nigh the bottom of the mountain. Beyond stretched, blue and vague to the southwest, the wide valley of the Kuskokwim, with an end of all mountains.
At many a Yukon village half the people died, despite the aid the few missionaries then on the river could afford; upon the Kuskokwim the havoc seems to have been still greater. Six years later, death again stalked through this region after having visited the Yukon, and this time seized his victims by the throat.
Thus the Kuskokwim country, which for long had been one of the least-known portions of Alaska, was opened up almost at a stroke. It was my purpose to visit Iditarod City during the winter of 1910-11, although, by reason of the distance to be travelled, a journey thither would involve the omission of the customary winter visit to upper Yukon points.
I had long desired to visit Lake Minchúmina and its little band of Indians, and to pass through the upper Kuskokwim country. So I had engaged a Minchúmina Indian as a guide, and laid my course up the Tanana River to the Coschaket, and then due south across country to Lake Minchúmina and the upper Kuskokwim.
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