elk-trails. In short, they had the same experience that all previous explorers had met with, travelling over "a succession of fine bottoms and pi*ecipitous mountain-sides, which in places approach the grandeur of a canon, until they arrived at a real and impassable canon where the stream rushed out between rocky walls one hundred feet in height." This experience was repeated on an ever-increasing scale of grandeur, the incidents of which the reader would find it wearisome to follow, until the summit of the range was attained, and the party descended the Quinault to the coast, and finally to Gray's Harbor, where they were welcomed with enthusiasm. I had the pleasure afterwards of hearing Lieutenant O'Neil deliver a lecture descriptive of his expedition, at the close of which he made the interesting statement that Mount Olympus has forty glaciers, and the surprising one that the Olympic Peninsula was good for nothing but a National Park. Whether the people of Washington will agree with him I know not, but I think it will take the strong arm of the government to keep them from the timber, minerals, and fish which it contains.
The last explorer of note who proposed to make the acquaintance of the Olj'mpics is Lord Lonsdale, who was going to take the route via Port Townsend, when Mr. J. T. Duncan, of Gray's Harbor, met him at that place to persuade him to take the safer and easier route from the south. It cannot be said hereafter that the Olympics are terra incognita, but only that they are, for the most part, an inhospitable country which, having once seen, few would care to see again except at a distance, and at a distance they are the most beautiful of all the ranges in the Northwest,—a joy forever to the resident on either side of the Strait or the Sound.
As a country in which to hunt game there is nothing more formidable than black bear, wolves, deer, and elk, the latter of which are numerous and not at all shy.
