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Updated: May 1, 2025
The temperature fell perceptibly as they climbed the heights, and the air had the heady quality of wine. It was awesome, this entering into the great company of the mountains. Presently Mary caught the glimmer of something white against the dark background of the hills. It gleamed like a snow-bank, though they were far below the snow-line on the mountain-side they were climbing.
After passing over the mountains of the coast, the Ariel had travelled at a uniform height of about 3000 feet over a magnificent country of hill and valley, forest and prairie, occasionally being obliged to rise another thousand feet or so to cross some of the ridges of mountain chains which rose into peaks and mountain knots, some of which touched the snow-line.
In the height of summer its snow-line will not be higher than seven thousand feet, while at the best season for climbing it, the spring, the snow-line is much lower. Its climbing is, like nearly all Alaskan problems, essentially one of transportation. But the Northeast Ridge, in its present condition, adds all the spice of sensation and danger that any man could desire.
Invisible its base remains, being the same delicious tint as the sky: only above the eternal snow-line its dreamy cone appears, seeming to hang, the ghost of a peak, between the luminous land and the luminous heaven the sacred and matchless mountain, Fujiyama. And suddenly, a singular sensation comes upon me as I stand before this weirdly sculptured portal a sensation of dream and doubt.
Dill had adroitly extracted the information that the twenty-mile trail to the river was the worst known, and snow-line blazes left by "Porcupine Jim" were, in summer, thirty feet in the air. Mr. Dill learned enough en route to satisfy himself that he was going to earn every dollar of his money, and when he reached Ore City he was sure of it.
Two species of the genus Attagis are in almost every respect ptarmigans in their habits; one lives in Tierra del Fuego, above the limits of the forest land; and the other just beneath the snow-line on the Cordillera of Central Chile. A bird of another closely allied genus, Chionis alba, is an inhabitant of the antarctic regions; it feeds on seaweed and shells on the tidal rocks.
It was below the snow-line, where only a few of the rocks showed, because of the numerous pines which grew luxuriantly; but, keen as was their eyesight, they were unable to detect the first sign of moving thing or life. "Try your glasses on it," said Hank. The boys brought the instruments round in front and levelled them at the point of interest. As they did so they made a discovery.
At 17,000 feet the vegetation has ceased to be alpine and has become arctic, and the plants nearest the snow-line are minute primulas, saxifrages, gentians, grasses, sedges, some tufted wormwood, and a dwarf rhododendron, the most alpine of wooded plants. At the summit of the Donkia Pass Hooker found one flowering plant, the Arenaria rupifragia.
Above and beyond the school-house Telegraph Hill rose a hundred feet or more. Our street marked the snow-line, as it were; beyond it the Hill was not inhabited save by flocks of goats that browsed there all the year round, and the herds of boys that gave them chase, especially of a holiday. The Hill was crowned by a shanty that had seen its best days.
The slide terminated at last upon the very edge of the snow-line, where it met a mile-wide meadow thickly clothed with lush grass and bountifully spangled with lovely flowers, many of which were quite new to the young Englishman.
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