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^[[cross [[superscript]] 1 [[/superscript]] W.H. Holmes Washington Oct. 1928
14]]
[[strikethrough]] Mr. Holmes' account of the ascent of the Holy Cross is added in this place:[[/strikethrough]]
^[[First]]
[[strikethrough]] ^[[Hayden Survey of the Territories, 1873]] [[/strikethrough]]
^[[First ascent of]] [[underlined]] THE MOUNTAIN OF THE HOLY CROSS [[/underlined]].
By H. H. Holmes, of the Hayden Exploring Expedition^[[, 1873]]

Until the middle of June the great front range of the Rocky Mountains had been crowned with an unbroken covering of snow, and the higher peaks looked forbidding enough to cool the ardor of the most ambitious mountaineer. We spent a few months on the plains and pine-covered foot-hills watching impatiently, the faces of the mountain. We marked how the snow line moved gradually upward, how the black rocks began to peep out making innumerable black patches, and how the snow finally occupied only small areas where it had filled depressions and accumulated in deep drifts. Our little party was not slow to take advantage of this growing weakness in our enemy's front and steadily advanced up the valleys, into dense timber, up long, steep slopes, through swamps and torrents and treacherous snowbanks; and long before the grass and flowers of those upper regions had felt the touch of spring, we were there. And many days before winter had finally surrendered the lofty summits, from a peak more than 14,000 feet above the sea we looked around upon one of the grandest panoramas that the world affords. To the east the great plain gave a horizon entirely unbroken, to the west innumerable mountains notched the sky like saw teeth. From the ramparts of a continent we looked out upon a boundless ocean, calm, motionless, inward upon a waste of mountains whose heights and depths and mystery fairly confounded us. 
This was to be the field of our labors, and we summoned our half-bewildered faculties to the task of identifying such great landmarks as would be necessary to guide us in our future wanderings. An indefinite number of high, ragged ranges could be traced by their lines of lofty summits as far away to the north and south as the eye could reach. But one among all these summits caught the eye and fixed the attention. Far away to the westward, we discovered a peak, a very giant among its fellows, a king amidst a forest of mountains that bore aloft on its dark face a great white cross, so perfect, so grand in proportions that at a distance of sixty miles we felt ourselves in its very presence.
Two months later we found ourselves approaching the region in which this mountain is located. On the 19th of August we stood on the ocean divide, from which the waters to the east are carried by the Arkansas down to the Gulf, while those to the west sink away and are lost in the mysterious gorges of the "great Colorado of the west." On the one side a narrow valley stretched away to the southeastward in a seemingly endless vista, while on the other the streams and valleys were almost immediately obscured by a mass of irregular