The most elevated fountain head of the Hudson is upon the northern branch. Within the inmost recesses of the mountain wilderness, in a ravine between two of the highest peaks, the river has its spring nearest the sky, known as "The Tear of the Clouds," a lofty pool, adjacent to one of the noted Adirondack portages, the Indian Pass, at about forty-three hundred feet elevation above the sea. From this pool the water flows out through the Feldspar Brook into the Opalescent River, which does not go far before it tumbles down the picturesque cascade of the Hanging Spear, leaping fifty feet into a narrow abyss between perpendicular walls, and emerging among a mass of huge boulders. All these rocks, like the greater part of the Aganus-chion, or Black Mountains, as the Indians often called the Adirondacks, are composed largely of the labradorite or opalescent feldspar, which fills the stream-bed with beautiful pebbles of blue or green or gold, many of them having all the colors. Thus glittering with the splendors of its rich coloring under the sunlight, the Opalescent River falls into Sandford Lake. A visitor to the Indian Pass says the explorers entered the rocky gorge between the steep slopes of Mount McIntyre and the cliffs of Wallface Mountain to the westward. Clambering high above the bottom of the canyon, they could see the famous Indian Pass between these mountains in all its wild grandeur. Before them rose a perpendicular cliff nearly twelve hundred feet from base to summit, its face being apparently as raw as if only just cleft. Above sloped Mount McIntyre, still more lofty than the cliff of Wallface, and in the gorge between lay piles of rocks, grand in dimensions and awful in aspect, as if hurled there by some terrible convulsion. Through these came the little stream going to the Hudson, bubbling along from its source close by a fountain of the Ausable. In spring freshets their waters commingle, part finding their way to the ocean at New York and part at Newfoundland.