SITKA AND VICINITY.                    125
on the Sitka side, there is a hard tramp for 5 or 7 miles through a swampy forest to the actual slope. In favourable weather a better landing may be made in a cove on the ocean side, whence it is only 2 or 3 miles to sloping ground. Once out on the open lava and scorie it is but an easy walk up an incline, and the crater is entered by a gap in the southeast rim. The snow leaves the slopes and crater entirely in midsummer. Steam rises from many sulphur-crusted vent-holes, and beautiful specimens of sulphur, lava, and volcanic glass are obtained. Several women have made the ascent in recent years.
After Tschirikow charted this mountain of St. Lazaria it was next seen by Maurclle, the pilot of Heceta and Bodega y Quadra's expedition sent out by the Spanish Viceroy Bucarelly. He entered "the great bay among mountains " St. Jacinth's day, August 16, 1775, named the peak San Jacinto and the bay Guadalupe.    La P6rouse next saw this peak of St. Hyacinth, and then Cook, May 2, 1778, named it Mt. Edgecumbe, and the bay the Bay of Terrors. Dixon called the bay Norfolk Sound, and Marchand (1791) took his predecessors to task for this renaming. "Que gagneroit la Geographie a ce changement de nom ? qu' y gagneroit l'inmortel Cook " ? he exclaimed, when the natives made him understand that the bay was Tchin-Kitane (a useful arm). He did not record the native name-Tlugh, or sleeping mountain.
Two Kadiak hunters climbed the mountain in 1804 and reported the crater filled with water. Lisiansky and Lieutenant Powalshin ascended in 1805, and found " a basin 2 miles in circumference and 40 fathoms deep filled with snow," July 23d. Lisiansky estimated the height at 8,000 ft., with forest reaching to within a mile and a half of the top. Lutke was told (1827) that the mountain was in eruption in 1796 and 1804. In 1867 Professor Davidson estimated its height at 2,855 ft. In 1886 Professor William Libby, Jr., of Princeton College, climbed to the crater's rim and gave its height as 3,782 ft. The whole mountain, according to Prof. Libbey, is only a parasitic cone on a greater volcanic mass of which the Camel's Back, N. of Edgecumbe, was the chief vent-hole. The oval crater in the Camel's Back is 5 miles long and 3 miles wide, a basin 1,500 ft. deep, with an internal slope of about 60°. The level floor is covered with forests and open parks, with several lakes. The Camel's Back rose from the sea cycles ago, and built around it the terraced platforms constituting Kruzoff Island. Edgecumbe was formed on its inert slopes only a few score centuries ago.
Sportsmen find many attractions within the 18-mile limits of the Kruzoff shores. There are bear and deer. There is a lake on the Sitka side where rainbow trout may be caught. There are many clam beaches, and a bay where Captain Beardslee found as many soft-shell crabs as in those exceptional seasons when Massett Inlet and Prince of Wales bays have been edged with broad windrows of cast-off shells.