A superb survey of Oonalashka Island can be made by the ascent of Mount Wood, which rears its sharp, syenitic peak two thousand eight hundred feet behind and right over the village and harbor of Illoolook. The path to the summit is not difficult, and the panorama spread out under your eyes well repays the effort. It gives you a better idea of what a singularly mountainous region the island is, of the comparative absence of level or bottom-land areas—everything seems to spring from the surrounding ocean mirror, to hills—from hills, in turn, to mountains that end in sharp and rugged peaks. Upon the rocky, frost-riven shingle of these summits nothing can grow except those tiny polar lichens which we find existing, clinging to the earth and rocks of the uttermost limits of the North as far as we have knowledge. If the fog lifts its gray-blue curtain from the unruffled, clear surface of Captain’s Harbor, and rolls back and away from the red and brown head of the cold crater of Paistrakov on the left, and from the black, jagged outlines of the “Prince” on your right, you will then have at your feet a picture of surpassing scenic beauty, both of contour and color, before and under your delighted vision. The rougher waters of Bering Sea have power no farther inland than their foaming at the feet of Waterfall Head and the dark bases of the Prince, for they rapidly fade into a smooth, still peace as the queer, hook-like sand-spit of Oolachta Harbor is reached, and the anchorage of Illoolook village is attained; its houses and barraboras just peep out from the obscuring foothills of the mountain upon which we stand, and we can faintly discern a delicate fringe of sea-foam along the border of a long-curved beach in front. Two schooners and a steamer lie motionless upon the glassy bay, like so many microscopic water insects. Turning right about and looking south, our eyes fall upon a radically different landscape—a bewildering, labyrinthian maze of Oonalashkan mountain peaks and ranges, rising in defiance to all law and order of position, with that lovely island-studded water of the head to Captain’s Harbor in the foreground. Ridge after ridge, summit after summit, fades out one behind the other into the oblivion of distance, where the suggestion of a continuance to this same wild interior is vividly made, in spite of wreaths of fog and lines of snowy sheen, relieved so brightly by that greenish-blue of the mosses and sphagnum in which they are set. A few pretty snow-buntings flutter over the rocks to the leeward of our position; their white, restless forms are the only evidence or indication of animal life in our rugged vista of an Oonalashkan interior. Yet, could we see better, we might notice a lurking red fox, and flush a bevy or two of summer-dressed ptarmigan, feeding as they do on the crowberries, the sphagnum, willow-buds and insect-life.