Much nearer than St. Elias, and a little west of north of my station, rose Mount Cook, one of the most beautiful peaks in the region. Its summit, unlike the isolated pyramid in which St. Elias terminates, is formed of three white domes, with here and there subordinate pinnacles of pure white, shooting up from the snow-fields like great crystals. On the southern side of Mount Cook there are several rugged and angular ridges, which sweep away for many miles and project like headlands into the sea of ice, known as the Malaspina glacier, bordering the ocean toward the southwest. Between the main ridges there are huge trunk glaciers, each contributing its flood of ice to the great glacier below; and each secondary valley and each amphitheatre among the peaks, no matter how small, has its individual glacier, and the majority of these are tributary to the larger ice-streams. All the mountains in sight exceeding 2,000 feet in elevation were white with snow, except the sharpest ridges and boldest precipices. The attention of the geologist is attracted by the fact that all the foot-hills of Mount Cook are composed of gray sandstone and black shale; and he also observes that the angular mountain crest so sharply drawn against the sky furnishes abundant evidence that the mountains were never subjected to the abrasion of a continuous ice-sheet. As I stood on the steep-sloped ridge, the Atrevida and Lucia glaciers, their surfaces covered from side to side with angular masses of sandstone and shale, lay at my feet; while farther up the valley the débris on the surface of the ice disappeared, and all above was a winter landscape. The brown, desolate débris-fields on the glacier at my feet extended far southward, and covered the expanded ice-foot in which the glacier terminates. Most curious of all was the fact that the moraines on the lower border of the glacier were concealed from view by a dense covering of vegetation, and in places were clothed with forests of spruce trees. To the southward, beyond the end of the Lucia glacier, and separated from it by a torrent-swept bowlder-bed, lay a vast {93} plateau of ice which stretched toward the south and west farther than the eye could reach. This is the Malaspina glacier, shown on plate 8. Its borders, like the expanded extremity of the Lucia glacier, are covered with débris, on the outer margins of which dense vegetation has taken root. All the central portion of the ice-sheet is clear of moraines, and shone in the sunlight like a vast snow-field. The heights formerly reached by the nearer glaciers were plainly marked along the mountain sides by well-defined terraces, sloping with the present drainage. When the Lucia glacier was at its flood the ridge on which I stood was only 200 or 300 feet above its surface; now it approaches 1,000 feet.