  Consider a graph whose edges have been colored red and blue. Assign a
nonnegative real weight to every edge so that at every vertex, the sum of the
weights of the incident red edges equals the sum of the weights of the incident
blue edges. The set of all such assignments forms a convex polyhedral cone in
the edge space, called the \emph{alternating cone}. The integral (respectively,
  $\{0,1\}$) vectors in the alternating cone are sums of characteristic vectors
of closed alternating walks (respectively, trails). We study the basic
properties of the alternating cone, determine its dimension and extreme rays,
and relate its dimension to the majorization order on degree sequences. We
consider whether the alternating cone has integral vectors in a given box, and
use residual graph techniques to reduce this problem to searching for a closed
alternating trail through a given edge. The latter problem, called alternating
reachability, is solved in a companion paper along with related results.
