It was in one of the wildest of all wild regions of the northern world.
"God-forsaken" . . . indeed? In truth, it seemed to be the very home
of God. There, between the bases of two towering perpendicular ranges
of mountains, mantled by endless snows and capped by eternal ice, lay
the wildest of all box-cañons: one end of which was blocked by a
barrier of snow hundreds of feet high and thousands of feet thick--the
work of countless avalanches; while the other end was blocked by a
barrier of eternal ice thousands of feet in width and millions of tons
in weight--a living and growing glacier. And there, away down at the
very bottom of that wild gorge, beside a roaring, leaping little river
of seething foam, grew a beautiful grove of trees; and never a time did
I enter there but what I thought of it as holy ground--far more holy
than any cathedral I have ever known . . . for there, in that grove,
one seemed to stand in the presence of God.

There, in that grove, the great reddish-brown boles of Sitka
spruces--four and five feet in diameter--towered up like many huge
architectural columns as they supported the ruggedly beamed and
evergreen ceiling that domed far overhead. High above an altar-like
mass of rock, completely mantled with gorgeously coloured mosses, an
opening shone in the gray-green wall, and through it filtered long
slanting beams of sunlight, as though coming through a leaded,
sky-blue, stained-glass window of some wonderful cathedral. While upon
the grove's mossy floor stood, row upon row, a mass of luxuriant ferns
that almost covered the velvet carpet, and seemed to form endless seats
in readiness for the coming of some congregation. But on only one
occasion did I ever see a worshipper there.

Weary from the weight of a heavy pack--seventy-five pounds of
dynamite--I had paused to rest a moment in that wonderful place which