the Hopis still send prayer plumes by a messenger who trots the 70 miles from the pueblos hither between sunrise and sunset of a summer day? Would it not give you a thrill to feel when passing through the aspen groves that dot the upper heights, that in such a rustling wood here upon this very mountain, when the world was young, the Hero-Children of the Spider Woman slew the wicked Giant Elk who ravaged the land of the Hopi—those Hero-Children of whom one was Youth, begotten of the Light, and the other Echo, begotten of the Raindrop?[72] From Flagstaff to the tip of Humphrey’s Peak, the highest of all, is 10 miles in a bee-line, or about 15 as pedestrians and horses go. Of this distance about 5 miles are by a good road practicable for automobiles, now winding through open forest, now skirting some ranch—a pleasant, old-fashioned highway bordered with worm fences and thickets of wild rose and goldenrod. From a certain point on the road to the Peaks, which are always in view, an easy trail leads through a charming forest to which the absence of underbrush gives a park-like character, open and sunny and carpeted in places with wild flowers. The prevailing trees for a couple of thousand feet of the ascent are yellow pines, rising at their best to a height of over 100 feet and probably of an age of 300 to 500 years. Above this yellow pine belt the trail steepens and zigzags sharply bringing you out at last amid broken stone and volcanic scoriae where no trees are, only shy sub-alpine plants clinging by their toes to the crevices of the rocks. Here a hog-back joins Humphrey’s Peak (12,611 feet) and Agassiz (12,330 feet), and you have the choice of mounting to either or both. Under the eastern slopes of these peaks a glacier 2 miles long once headed, whose bed is now a large valley within the mountain’s folds dropping downward to the northeast. To the geological, this valley with its moraine and glaciated rocks is a source of especial interest, since it constitutes one of the southernmost instances of ice action within the United States.[73]