Passing Through The Strait, We Have The Olympic Mountains Close At
Hand On The Right, Vancouver Island On The Left, And The Snowy Peak Of
Mount Baker Straight Ahead In The Distance.
During calm weather, or
when the clouds are lifting and rolling off the mountains after a
storm, all these views are truly magnificent.
Mount Baker is one of
that wonderful series of old volcanoes that once flamed along the
summits of the Sierras and Cascades from Lassen to Mount St. Elias.
Its fires are sleeping now, and it is loaded with glaciers, streams of
ice having taken the place of streams of glowing lava. Vancouver
Island presents a charming variety of hill and dale, open sunny spaces
and sweeps of dark forest rising in swell beyond swell to the high
land in the distance.
But the Olympic Mountains most of all command attention, seen
tellingly near and clear in all their glory, rising from the water's
edge into the sky to a height of six or eight thousand feet. They
bound the strait on the south side throughout its whole extent,
forming a massive sustained wall, flowery and bushy at the base, a
zigzag of snowy peaks along the top, which have ragged-edged fields of
ice and snow beneath them, enclosed in wide amphitheaters opening to
the waters of the strait through spacious forest-filled valleys
enlivened with fine, dashing streams. These valleys mark the courses
of the Olympic glaciers at the period of their greatest extension,
when they poured their tribute into that portion of the great northern
ice sheet that overswept the south end of Vancouver Island and filled
the strait with flowing ice as it is now filled with ocean water.
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