The descent was as anxious and hazardous as the ascent had been laborious. The dogs were loosed and sent racing down the slope. With a rope rough-lock around the sled runners, one man took the gee pole and another the handle-bars and each spread-eagled himself through the loose deep snow to check the momentum of the sled, until sled and men turned aside and came to a stop in a drift to avoid a steep, smooth pitch. The sled extricated, it was poised on the edge of the pitch and turned loose on the hardened snow, hurtling down three or four hundred feet until it buried itself in another drift. The dogs were necessary to drag it from this drift, and one had to go down and bring them up. Then again they were loosed, and from bench to bench the process was repeated until the slope grew gentle enough to permit the regulation of the downward progress by the foot-brake. [Sidenote: "SUMMITS"] The Eagle summit is one of the most difficult summits in Alaska. The wind blows so fiercely that sometimes for days together its passage is almost impossible. No amount of trail making could be of much help, for the snow smothers up everything on the lee of the hill, and the end of every storm presents a new surface and an altered route. A "summit" in this Alaskan sense is, of course, a saddle between peaks, and in this case there is no easier pass and no way around. The only way to avoid the Eagle summit, without going out of the district altogether, would be to tunnel it. The summit passed, we found better trails and a more frequented country, for in this district are a number of creeks that draw supplies from Circle City, and that had been worked ten years or more. At the time of the Klondike stampede of 1896-97, Circle City was already established as a flourishing mining camp and boasted itself the largest log-cabin town in the world. Before the Klondike drew away its people as a stronger magnet draws iron filings from a lesser one, Circle had a population of about three thousand. Take a town of three thousand and reduce it to thirty or forty, and it is hard to resist the melancholy impression which entrance upon it in the dusk of the evening brings. There lay the great white Yukon in the middle distance; beyond it the Yukon Flats, snow-covered, desolate, stretched away enormously, hedged here at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread out in the foreground were the little, squat, huddling cabins that belonged to no one, with never a light in a window or smoke from a chimney, the untrodden snow drifted against door and porch. It would be hard to imagine a drearier prospect, and one had the feeling that it was a city of the dead rather than merely a dead city.