Nature has painted canvases more colorful, but none more perfect in its strength and rest. Here is no flare of the desert, none of the flamboyant, terrible beauty of the Grand Canyon. It is a land of warm ocean winds and cherishing sunshine, where the emeralds and jades of the valleys quickly give place to the bluer greens of evergreen forests that cover the hill country; and these, in turn, as distance grows, shade into the lavenders and grays of the successive ranges. The white peaks complete the picture with its most characteristic note. They give it distinction. [Illustration: Lower end of Eliot glacier, seen from Cooper Spur, and showing the lateral moraines which this receding glacier has built in recent years.] [Illustration: Snout of Eliot glacier, its V-shaped ice front heavily covered with morainal debris.] Such a panorama justifies Ruskin's bold assertion: "Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery." Without its mountains, the view from Council Crest would be as uninteresting as that from any tower in any prairie city. But all mountains are not alike. In beginning our journey to the three great snow-peaks which we have viewed from Portland heights, it is well to define, if we may, the special character of our Northwestern scene. We sometimes hear the Cascade district praised as "the American Switzerland." Such a comparison does injustice alike to our mountains and to the Alps. As a wild, magnificent sea of ice-covered mountain tops, the Alps have no parallel in America. As a far-reaching system of splendid lofty ranges clothed in the green of dense forests and surmounted by towering, isolated summits of snowy volcanoes, the Cascades are wholly without their equal in Europe. This is the testimony of famous travelers and alpinists, among them Ambassador Bryce, who has written of our Northwestern mountain scenery: We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or in the Pyrenees. The combination of ice scenery with woodland scenery of the grandest type is to be found nowhere in the Old World, unless it be in the Himalayas, and, so far as we know, nowhere else on the American continent. [Illustration: Cone of Mount Hood, seen from Cooper Spur on northwest side. A popular route to the summit leads along this ridge of volcanic scoriæ and up the steep snow slope above.] [Illustration: Cloud Cap Inn, north side of Mount Hood. Elevation 5,900 feet.] In his celebrated chapter of the "Modern Painters" which describes the sculpture of the mountains, Ruskin draws a picture of the Alps that at once sets them apart from the Cascades: