St Elias, MOUNT, a great volcanic mountain just inside the Canadian frontier of Alaska, long believed to be the highest mountain on the American continent, 19,500 feet high. Again it has been reduced to 13,500; but in 1892 it was found by triangulation to be 18,010 feet—lower than Orizaba (18,340 ft.). It stands in a wild, inaccessible region, and is clothed almost from base to summit with eternal snow.
There are huge glaciers and utterly impassable precipices and yawning chasms; but in 1886 a party comprising Schwatka, Wood, and Seton Carr reached a height of 7200 feet on the mount, nearly all above the snow-level.