necks.
"Weren't the kiddies afraid?" I asked.
"Not a bit! Bob got the trout ready; and Son made a big fire. We curled ourselves up round it for the night; and I wish you could have seen the children's delight when the clouds began to roll up below in the morning. It was like a sea. The youngsters had never seen clouds take fire from the sun coming up below. I want to tell you, too, that we put out every spark of that fire before we left in the morning."
All of which conveys its own moral for the camper in the National Forests.
It ought not to be necessary to say that you cannot go to the National Forests expecting to billet yourself at the ranger's house. Many of the rangers are married and have a houseful of their own. Those not married, have no facilities whatever for taking care of you. In my visit to the Vasquez Forest, I happened to have a letter of introduction to the ranger and his mother, who took me in with that bountiful hospitality characteristic of the frontier; but directly across the road from the ranger's cabin was a little log slab-sided hotel where any comer could have stayed in perfect comfort for $7 a week; and at the station, where the train stopped, was another very excellent little hotel where you could have stayed and enjoyed meals that for nutritious cooking might put a New York dinner to shame—all to the tune of $10 a week. Also, at this very station, is the Supervisor's office of the Forestry Department. By inquiry here, the newcomer can ascertain all facts as to tenting outfit and camping place. Only one point must be kept in mind—do not go into the National Forests expecting the railroads, or the rangers, or Providence, to look after you. Do not go unless you are prepared to look after yourself.
And now that you are in the National Forests, what are you going to do? You can ride; or you can hunt; or you can fish; or you can bathe in the hot springs that dot so many of these intermountain regions, where God has landscaped the playground for a nation; or you can go in for records mountain climbing; or you can go sightseeing in the most marvelously beautiful mountain scenery in the whole world; or you can prowl round the prehistoric cave and cliff dwellings of a race who flourished in mighty power, now solitary and silent cities, contemporaneous with that Egyptian desert runner whose skeleton lies in the British Museum marked 20,000 BC It isn't every day you can wander through the deserted chambers of a king's palace with 500 rooms. Tourist agencies organize excursion parties for lesser and younger palaces in Europe. I haven't heard of any to visit the silent cities of the cliff and cave dwellers on the Jemez Plateau of New Mexico, or the Gila River, Arizona, or even the easily accessible dead cities of forgotten peoples in the National Forest of Southern Colorado. What race movement in the first place sent these races perching their wonderful tier-on-tier houses literally on the tip-top of the world?
The prehistoric remains of the Southwest are now, of course, under the jurisdiction of the Forestry Department; and you can't go digging and delving and carrying relics from the midden heaps and baked earthen floors without the permission of the Secretary of Agriculture; but if you go in the spirit of an investigator, you will get that permission.
The question isn't what is there to do. It is which of the countless things there are to do are you going to choose to do? When Mr. Roosevelt goes to the National Forests, he strikes for the Holy Cross Mountain and bags a grizzly. When ordinary folk hie to this Forest, they take along a bathing suit and indulge in a daily plunge in the hot pools at Glenwood Springs. If the light is good and the season yet early, you can still see the snow in the crevices of the peak, giving the Forest its name of the Holy Cross. People say there is no historic association to our West. Once a foolish phrase is uttered, it is surprising how sensible people will go on repeating it. Take this matter of the "Holy Cross" name. If you go investigating how these "Holy Cross" peaks got their names from old Spanish padres riding their burros into the wilderness, it will take you a hard year's reading just to master the Spanish legends alone. Then, if you dive into the realm of the cliff dwellers, you will be drowned in historic antiquity before you know. In the Glenwood Springs region, you will not find the remnants of prehistoric people; but you'll find the hot springs.
Just two warnings: one as to hunting; the other, as to mountain climbing. There is still big game in Colorado Forests—bear, mountain sheep, elk, deer; and the ranger is supposed to be a game warden; but a man patrolling 100,000 acres can't be all over at one time. As to mountain climbing, you can get your fill of it in Grand Cañon, above Ouray, at Pike's Peak—a dozen places, and only the mountain climber and his troglodyte cliff-climbing prototype know the drunken, frenzied joy of climbing on the roof of the earth and risking life and limb to stand with the kingdoms of the world at your feet. But unless you are a trained climber, take a guide with you, or the advice of some local man who knows the tricks and the moods and the wiles and the ways of the upper mountain world. Looking from the valley up to the peak, a patch of snow may seem no bigger to you than a good-sized table-cloth. Look out! If it is steep beneath that "table-cloth" and the forest shows a slope clean-swept of trees as by a mighty broom, be careful how you cross and recross following the zigzag trail that corkscrews up below the far patch of white! I was crossing the Continental Divide one summer in the West when a woman on the train pointed to a patch of white about ten miles up the mountain slope and asked if "that" were "rock or snow." I told her it was a very large snow field, indeed; that we saw only the forefoot of it hanging over the edge; that the upper part was supposed to be some twenty miles across. She gave me a look meant for Mrs. Ananias. A month later, when I came back that way, the train suddenly slowed up. The slide had come down and lay in white heaps across the track three or four miles down into the valley and up the other side. The tracks were safe enough; for the snow shed threw the slide over the track on down the slope; but it had caught a cluster of lumbermen's shacks and buried eight people in a sudden and eternal sleep. "We saw it coming," said one of the survivors, "and we thought we had plenty of time. It must have been ten miles away. One of the men went in to get his wife. Before he could come out, it was on us. Man and wife and child were carried down in the house just as it stood without crushing a timber. It must have been the concussion of the air—they weren't even bruised when we dug them out; but the kid couldn't even have wakened up where it lay in the bed; and the man hadn't reached the inside room; but they were dead, all three."
And near Ouray another summer, a chance acquaintance pointed to a peak. "That one caught my son last June," he said. "He was the company's doctor. He had been born and raised in these mountains; but it caught him. We knew the June heat had loosened those upper fields; and his wife didn't want him to go; but there was a man sick back up the mountain; and he set out. They saw it coming; but it wasn't any use. It came—quick—" with a snap of his fingers—"as that; and he was gone."
It's a saying among all good mountaineers that it's "only the fool who monkeys with a mountain," especially the mountain with a white patch above a clean-swept slope.
And there is another thing for the holiday player in the National Forests to do; and it is the thing that I like best to do. You have been told so often that you have come to believe it—that our mountains in America lack the human interests; lack the picturesque character and race types dotting the Alps, for instance. Don't you believe it! Go West! There isn't a mountain or a forest from New Mexico to Idaho that has not its mountaineering votary, its quaint hermit, or its sky-top guide, its refugee from civilization, or simply its lover of God's Great Outdoors and Peace and Big Silence, living near to the God of the Great Open as log cabin on a hilltop capped by the stars can bring him. Wild creatures of woodland ways don't come to your beck and call. You have to hunt out their secret haunts. The same with these Western mountaineers. Hunt them out; but do it with reverence! I was driving in the Gunnison country with a local magnate two years ago. We saw against the far sky-line a cleft like the arched entrance to a cave; only this arch led through the rock to the sky beyond.
"I wish," said my guide, "you had time to spend two or three weeks here. We'd take you to the high country above these battlements and palisades. See that hole in the mountain?"
"Rough Upper Alpine meadows?" I asked.
"Oh,
