During the day several parties came up, some on horses, to within a mile and a half of the top, where snow covers the trail and renders further progress on horseback impossible, but everyone looked pale and exhausted. Hot coffee brought them around all right in a short time. A party of us went over to the north side of the Peak and tumbled rocks down the side. Some of these went crashing down nearly two thousand feet before they stopped. During the afternoon clouds gathered, but just before sunset the sun came out and the shadow of the Peak was plainly seen against the clouds to the east. Even the shadow of the square stone house was discerned, and then two of us went out to one end of the house, and surely, there we were, standing like the spectres of the Brocken near the shadow of the house, out over the plains twenty-five miles away and fourteen thousand feet above the ground. To be sure our shadows were not as clean cut as though we were nearer the object on which the shadows were cast, but anyone could see the general form. About 9 o'clock that night a terrific thunder storm raged out over the plains to the northeast. The highest clouds were not much above, and most of them far below us. We heard none of the thunder and saw very little of the lightning as it flashed, but the whole mass of clouds was lighted up incessantly. It was a grand sight. The whole sky to the north, west, and south, was perfectly clear, and the stars shone out with remarkable clearness, notwithstanding the full moon was shining so brightly and placidly out over the plains to the east. Everywhere else the world was at peace, but in the northeast those clouds made silver by the light of the moon, were rolling and tumbling and were constantly lighted by the fiery flashes of lightning. And yet not a sound was to be heard. There was no wind, and everything above and below was so quiet and still. And from the northeast, where we could see such a great commotion, there was not the faintest sound. If there had been no clouds anywhere that night the stillness would have seemed natural enough, but to see such a terrific storm raging (and I never saw lightning before), and to see the wind tearing those clouds all to pieces, and yet to have everything so silent you could almost hear yourself think, that was a most weird situation. The weather on Pike's Peak is hardly more severe than it is below, even during the winter. For severity, it is not to be compared with that of Mt. Washington. The wind never blows harder than seventy-five or eighty miles an hour. The roof of the house is a common tin one. They keep up a wood fire the year round. The telegraph wires are not kept in repair, so the weather reports are only sent in by rail. Pike's Peak is not in reality a very important weather station.