Skyline camps; a note book of a wanderer in our northwestern mountains

Front matter

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Contents

I

In Glacier Park

Storm and Shine on the Divide ... 3 PiEGAN Pines and Gunsight Pass ... 39 Wild Strawberries 58

II

EFORE I went to Lake Chelan, I had never even heard of it, which no doubt proves my lack of acquaintance with the map of Washington, on which it occupies no inconspicuous place, as any body of water must which is more than fifty miles long. That was several years ago, yet even to-day I meet few people who do not greet the name with a query, " And where is Lake Chelan? " The East is still but little acquainted with the Cascade Mountains, excepting, of course. Mount Rainier, and even less acquainted, perhaps, with the inaccessible Olympics. Yet in the Cascades are probably the two most difficult Alpine or snow climbs in the United States, and the two most extraordinary and beautiful lakes. Washington has the most difficult climb — the north wall of Mount Baker, and the second most beautiful lake, Chelan. Oregon has the most beautiful and wonderful body of water. Crater Lake, and the second most difficult climb, Mount Jefferson. So honors are even, and that is well, as you will agree if you are acquainted with the inhabitants of those two states.

To reach Lake Chelan we left the main line of the Great Northern at Wenatchee, a town perched on the steep bank of the Columbia River and dedicated to the production of apples and cherries. It was, indeed, cherry time when we arrived, a fact which considerably delayed our departure. Opinions differ regarding the merits of Oregon and Washington apples, though the quality is undoubtedly improving under experimentation. But the Bing cherry admits of no dispute. It is essentially a product of the Northwest, and apparently doesn't thrive elsewhere. But the deep, volcanic soil, the equable climate, and the irrigation-controlled moisture, seem peculiarly to favor all the varieties of cherries which are grown there. They attain a size, a firmness, a bloom, and a flavor, which alone would have justified all Whitman's exertions on that famous ride.

The Columbia comes down to Wenatchee from the north, on the easterly side of the Cascade barrier, which is visible from the heights above the town. The main line of the railroad follows up the confluent Wenatchee River, to find a way through the mountains; but a branch line follows the Columbia northward, and it is this branch you take to reach Lake Chelan, getting off at Chelan Falls, where the station sits close to the edge of the softly hissing great green stream, and the bank rises steeply up for several hundred feet, shutting you into a canon. Out of this canon a dusty road rises by a series of switchbacks — a road unprotected by fence or wall, cut into the face of the bank. It brings you up on a level shelf, bounded by green hills and fertile with new orchards; and you cross this shelf for two or three miles, to reach a little town on the shore of a green lake, a lake perhaps five miles long, ending against the doming green hills. Here we transferred our luggage to a motor boat that seemed ridiculously seaworthy and powerful for so small a body of water, and chug-chugged our way northwestward, up the lake. Out on the water, we could see the green checkerboards of the new orchards sloping everywhere down to the shore line, and the new " ranch " houses springing up among them, for this was boom country, but newly opened to the fruit growers. In the crystal-clear, dry air we could plainly see a man hoeing between the rows of new trees, like little green polka dots, and we could even catch the quicksilver flash of the irrigation stream as it followed his hoe. As we moved on across the green water, which gave one a curious sensation of great depth, we began to notice that two of the doming hills at the upper end of the lake did not meet, but were a gateway through which the lake went on into unseen regions. Soon we were passing through this gateway, and saw that the lake extended yet another five miles, and entered a second gateway, composed of two headlands higher and more rugged than the first. The lake was perhaps three miles wide, and strongly suggested a larger and wilder Hudson River, where it passes between Storm King and the Point.

Through the second gateway we moved on the deep green water, and lo ! five miles ahead of us was a third, between headlands still higher, still more rugged and precipitous, looking at last like genuine mountains. The lake, however, grew no wider, though it grew rougher, as a wind came suckingdown it. We began to realize it as a long, narrow fiord winding into the heart of the range. All signs of orchards, or indeed of habitation, soon ceased along its banks. Those banks became great down-sloping cliffs of dark basaltic rock, hung with ferns and firs on the ledges, and draped with waterfalls. They offered no chance at all for farm or dwelling. Higher and higher they rose, and more and more precipitous, till they shot sheer out of the water at the base, gradually stepping back in forested terraces to their mountain summits three, four.

five, six thousand feet above the lake. In places there was absolutely no beach at all. The skipper took the boat close in, and we could see the precipice plunge down out of sight into the green depths. The Mawretania could lay up alongside and throw out a gangplank to some ledge where a fir tree perched, or a garden of paintbrush and lupine painted the face of the rock. The lake is about sixteen hundred feet dee^), which brings its bottom well below sea level, and if it were emiJtied of water, the hole at the upper end, where the mountain walls are highest, would be from one to three thousand feet deeper than the Grand Canon of the Colorado.

But there seemed to be no upper end. Being so narrow, Lake Chelan has only to curve the least degree around a headland to shut out the view, and we passed through wild gateway after wild gateway, the last formed by peaks eight thousand feet high, before we came at last, more than fifty miles from our starting point, into the final stretch of water that led to a pier, a small hotel, and a cove of forest huddled at the feet of overhanging snow-clad summits. We had come by water into the very heart of the high Cascades. I think there is no other such approach to mountains in the United States.

Life at the little hotel had much of the democracy of camping about it. The proprietor was just coming in from the Stehekin River, which rushed down from the snow-fields into the lake immediately behind the strawberry patch, with a string of threepound trout in his hand.

" How were they biting? " somebody asked him, a foolish question in face of the evidence.

*' I had to hide behind a tree to bait my hook," he answered.

At dinner we chanced to talk about the theory that goitre can result from an excessive drinking of snow water. Our waitress was an interested listener, and at last she could contain herself no longer, for pride.

" I got a goitre! " she beamed.

Of course we christened her Queenie, in honor of the sister of Herman and Verman, whom Penrod and Sam so admired because of a similar possession. After supper Queenie was one of the belles of the ball, held in the hotel lobby with a phonograph for orchestra. The proprietor had put on a coat for the occasion, but soon removed it again. And outside, in the northern twilight, the lake lay in deep, night shadow, beneath the beetling cliffs, while six thousand feet aloft the sentinel summits were still bright with the departed day.

Lake Chelan lies in a national forest, and there are many ranger trails to ride, but unfortunately we were " doing " the lake as a side trip, and our time was limited. We could choose but one, and that one must not take us far afield. So, when morning came, we chose the trail up War Creek Pass, which leads over the northern wall, at the head of the lake, climbing to an altitude of nearly eight thousand feet. The ascent began, of course, almost immediately, but there was a brief half mile through heavy woods along the lake shore, and here I saw my first foxgloves growing wild — saw them, I confess, with bitter envy.

How we, in the East, toil to achieve foxgloves! Tender biennials, we grow hundreds of little plants, and then try every known device to winter them for the next season's blooming. I have planted them in the currant bushes; I have planted them in cold frames; I have covered them with straw, with pine boughs, with dead leaves; I have left them uncovered. I have prayed for them — and cursed them. And sometimes they live through, and sometimes they don't. Never do all of them survive, and often none of them survives. But here, in an open glade by Lake Chelan, surrounded by great fir and cedar trees, and under the very shadow of the snow-capped peaks, were dozens and dozens of foxgloves, growing without any care, wild flowers like weeds, and almost as tall as a man, magnificent great spikes of pure white, and of white mottled with pink. There wasn't a magenta flower in the whole garden! I have always said our eastern showy lady's-slipper {cypripedium spectabile) is the queen of wild flowers, but a stately white foxglove plant in a glade of the forest by Lake Chelan is certainly a dangerous rival.

The trail now began to ascend, always steeply, by longer or shorter switchbacks, sometimes over open slopes and ledges of volcanic soil, sometimes through forest. At first the way was bordered with flowering shrubs in great profusion, the most conspicuous being the capberry, a large bush with copious blossoms not unlike small white wild roses, and the showy goat's-beard, with its spirea-like white plumes. As the trail began to come out on dizzy ledges far above the water, however, the slopes of powdery volcanic ash grew still steeper, the shrubs disappeared, and in their place was a great profusion of lower wild flowers — bright orange paintbrush, blue lupine, blue larkspur, in places carpeting the ground almost to the exclusion of the sparse grass, and wandering among the great brown boles of the forest trees in bands and threads of color. The trees themselves, for the most part Douglas firs, with a sprinkling of cedars and now and then a deciduous variety, did not grow in dense stands. Each tree, two or three feet in diameter and rising straight up for fifty feet without a hmb, seemed to preempt a certain space for itself, giving to the forested ledges a curious and beautiful park-like aspect. Brown tree boles like temple columns, bright orange and blue carpets of flowers, and between the columns and over the flowers, the eye roving to glimpse the green water far below, and across the water the great eight-thousand-foot leap of Castle Rock, and beyond that the eternal snow-fields: here are hanging gardens, indeed.

Above these gardens we very soon came to the lower edge of the drifts. These drifts came down like long white fingers into the diminishing forest, and they were melting back rapidly, the wild flowers following them, so that dog-tooth violets would sometimes be in full bloom not six feet from a wall of snow. At six thousand feet the evergreens still held on, and while they were stunted, they were not perceptibly storm-scarred. In the next thousand feet, however, they rapidly gave way to small hardwoods, a curious little forest of gray trunks, half of them dead and either fallen or leaning on their neighbors, ghostlike against the gray, volcanic rocks. Before the final pull up to the col which is the summit of the pass, a mere depression between two naked stone heaps, and well over seven thousand feet above sea level, the trees ceased enth'ely, leaving the ridge desolate and wild — fit preparation for the prospect that greets you when you reach the top.

What a world! All across the western sky, sweeping northward as far as the eye can see, sweeping southward so near you can almost touch them, and then bending to the east, advancing upon you like the tossed and stormy crest of some gigantic wave, are the Cascade Mountains, white-capped with snow, foam-furrowed with glaciers, and deep in their hollows dark with forests. Away in the northwest, blue and cloud-white, almost hanging in the air, is Mount Baker. Behind you, and six thousand feet almost directly below you, is the opalescent green water of Lake Chelan, with Castle Rock shooting up on the farther side, and not far to the left, and seeming but a few miles away, the splendid cone of Glacier Peak, with its white glacier spreading long tentacles down its sides, as if some strange octopus of ice had perched upon the summit.

I looked long and wistfully at this mountain, realizing that with a few more days to spare we could have ridden the trail around to its base, and tackled one of those long ice arms leading to its summit mysteries of frozen silence.

We made our camj) at almost six thousand feet, near the lower end of a melting drift that ran crystal-cold water over the ground and fed the roots of the violets. And we thought of Queenie as we drank. Our tents were strung between the boles of sheltering fir trees, and we saw, between the brown trunks, the cloud shadows trail over the green water far below, flushing it to amethyst; we saw the sun sink behind the snow-clad pyramids of the Cascade Divide, and the rosy blush linger on the white cap of Glacier Peak. Then we saw night fill up the vast hole where the lake lay bosomed, and we felt the cold come down from the naked col above us. In the hotel, far below, the guests could then see our camp fire leap up anew, like a star that was caught on the mountain.

Ill

Interlude On the Hills of Home

ON THE HILLS OF HOME— THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL

LITTLE friend of mine who came back to the Berkshires after a trip through the Rockies, and remarked, " Father, this is practically a prairie," expressed the feeling all of us have when we first return to our tamer environment, from the big places. How well I remember, as a small boy, thrilling to a sharp escarpment of rock which rose near the railroad track on the way from my home to Boston — I think it was in a place called Middlesex Fells. My regret was that this rock face wasn't in my own town, so I could climb its thrilling inclination. Then, one summer, we went to the White Mountains. On our return, I looked for my rock face as the train passed by. To my amazement, I could hardly detect it. It had shrunk to insignificance! Not until almost Christmas time had my memory of Tuckerman's Ravine sufficiently faded for that little cliff in Middlesex Fells to reassume its rightful proportions. It is difficult, whatever our age, to prevent this sort of shrinkage at home, when we return from abroad. Yet we should, I think, take thought to prevent it, because it seems to be unfortunately true that the people who, as a class, will make the effort to preserve and develop our native wilderness, are the people who have loved and tramped the larger wildernesses. The stay-at-home is seldom actively appreciative of his environment. Somebody else has to impart the impulse to him. So never undervalue your back yard boulder!

I live under the shadow of Mount Everett, the second-highest mountain in Massachusetts. It is a noble, dome-shaped summit, rising from a ten-milelong rampart, with steep shoulders dropping precipitously down to the Housatonic plain. My own forests go up its side to the 2,000 foot level, and the summit rises 600 feet above that level, and a mile or so back across an upland scrub forest. To north and south, for ten miles, along this percipitous eastern wall of the buttress are many ravines, one, at least, clothed with virgin hemlock, and musical with falling water. In a season of comfortable precipitation, there are no less than four groups of tumbling waterfalls along this mountainside, and in three of them the water lasts through a drought. There is also a spur of the mountain which juts sharply out to the east, with a precipitous rock face on the southern side, known as Black Rock. In the crevices of this rock face, and if the day is warm on its ledges, live rattlesnakes, a thriving colony of them which persistent annual hunting by Dr. Ditmars of the Bronx Zoo, and by local snake admirers, has failed to exterminate, or even, seemingly, to diminish. The face of Black Rock, and the ravines down which the brooks tumble, are extremely steep, in places so precipitous that I often take a rope along when some party of guests on a picnic want to climb, and lay a railing for their assistance. Between these ravines, the whole wall is well timbered, and even more heavily clothed with an undergrowth of laurel. It is wild, up-ended country, where the deer roam and an occasional wildcat.

Back of the 2,000 foot ridge, sloping much more gradually to the summit dome, is a region of smaller timber, jack pines, scrub oak, azalea, with hemlocks and birch in the fertile hollows. All this region surrounding the dome, as well as the summit itself, is a Massachusetts State reservation. On the peak is a steel fire observation tower, though the summit vegetation is storm dwarfed and no tower is needed for ordinary lookout.

Just under the dome, to the north, and within the reservation, is a lovely pond. It lies more than 2,000 feet above sea level, covers probably forty acres, and is completely surrounded by hemlocks, which march down almost to the rocky shore line, to look at their reflections over the tops of the laurel bushes. In June, when the pink laurel borders the dark brown water of this mountain tarn, the hemlocks, with storm-twisted limbs, rise against a blue sky, and from the pathless woods ring the songs of the hermit thrushes, it would be hard to find a lovelier spot, even in the Rockies themselves. It is pleasant to scramble up the ravine from my house, with a blanket roll and a pack, to build a little fire beside this tarn, to hear the hermits blow their elfin clarions in the depths of the hemlocks, to watch the stars come out over the summit dome, and to drop off to sleep while the bullfrogs along the margin of the pond twang their G strings, deep answering unto deep.

That is one face of the medal. The other is not so pleasant to contemplate. This really rather splendid mountain, wild, rugged, picturesque, for all its meagre 2,600 feet of height, is practically undeveloped for recreational purposes — and, of course, it is fit for very little else. There is no trail up any of the ravines. There are two old roads, laid out a hundred and fifty years ago and long since abandoned because of their steepness, which go up from the east, and in places are still open enough to follow, though the laurel is fast closing them in. Along my north boundary, the telephone wire to the observation tower goes straight up, and a trail is kept clear below it by the repair men. This is at present the only really cleared trail to the top, but it is extremely steep, passes by no water, and is uninteresting except as a means for attaining violent exercise. There is no trail whatever around Guilder Pond, the beautiful mountain tarn under the dome. To get around it, you have to fight your way through forest and rank undergrowth. No clearings have been made by its shore, no camping sites, no provision for safe fires. So far as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is concerned, which through a commission of three men no doubt chosen for their political affiliations rather than their interest in recreation, administers the affairs of the summit acres of Mount Everett, nothing is of any importance but the construction of a so-called motor road up from the high plateau on the west side. This road passes one end of Guilder Pond and then starts up the summit dome. Beyond the pond, nobody uses it. The money gave out, anyhow, before it reached the summit, and it now ends nowhere — an ugly scar on the side of the cone. Any person of seventy-five years, in average health, could easily walk to the summit, up the footpath from Guilder

Pond. There was never the slightest need for the road. It is a pathetic monument to the stupidity and blindness of politically appointed reservation commissioners.

What the commissioners should have done, of course, was to open up so much of the summit forests as they controlled to campers and hikers. There should be a trail around the pond, with several camp clearings, including fire pits, lean-to shelters, refuse disjDosal pits and neat signs, copied from those of the United States Forest Service in the West, instructing people in the proper use of fire, of camps, of the public domain. There should be trails leading from the base of the summit cone to two or three of the most interesting lines of descent into the Housatonic valley, and after they were built, or cleared out, the cooperation of individuals or organizations in the valley should have been secured to connect them up with the highroad below. The most interesting descent of all, that through the ravine of virgin hemlocks — and how few stands of virgin timber there are left in Massachusetts! — is controlled by the Commonw^ealth nearly to the base of the cliffs, and from there on the cooperation of the boys of the Berkshire School could doubtless be secured to keep the trail open and posted. As it is, nothing has been done, as

I write, to clear out the devastation of the great ice storm of November 1921, there are no blazes, no trail, and when I recently sent up a party of twenty hikers, members of the Appalachian Club from Boston, by that route, it was with considerable misgiving, since half of them were women. They were in for a severe two hours.

If you stand on the summit of Mount Everett and look due north, you see fifty miles away the blue hump of Greylock, in the extreme northwestern corner of the State. Greylock is the only mountain in Massachusetts rising more than 3,000 feet. Because of that fact, there was a road to the top before the Commonwealth took over the summit mass for a reservation. It is also provided with foot trails, some of which, however, in recent years have been allowed to close in so that they are difficult, if not dangerous to follow. The Greylock Reservation Commission, none the less, have always shown a real regard for the mountain, and a vision of recreational development. They have at least provided a camp site.

As you look northward from the Dome to Greylock, you can observe the intervening topography. The two summits, in the two western corners of the State, are at either end of a more or less unbroken spine, which practically forms the Massachusetts-

New York boundary. East of the spine (which is called the Taconic Ridge), lies a plain, with scattered mountains in it, averaging about 2,000 feet in height. Then the land rises sharply again to the M^ild, broken upland plateau which is the main range of the Berkshires, the main link in the long Appalachian chain, the Taconic Ridge being a slender side link, as it were. It is perfectly obvious, however, that when the Appalachian Trail is built, if that fascinating project ever is carried out, it must enter Massachusetts from Connecticut over the dome of Mount Everett, and it must enter Vermont from Massachusetts do^\n the Bellows Pipe ravine of Greylock. It must surely include, in other words, the two major summits of the State. The real problem is — how to get it from one peak to the other. . . .

There is, alas, very little chance that the Appalachian Trail will be constructed before this book is published, so this may be a suitable place, before going further, to say something about that project. It is the dream of Mr. Benton MacKaye and others to build a skyline trail from northern Georgia, where the Appalachian chain begins, to the northeastern outposts of the White Mountains, where it ends. It would, of course, be a foot trail only, and in many sections it could hardly be more than a blazed trail. It would take in, so far as possible, all the major summits, from Klingman's Dome to Washington, and in general it would follow the top of the highest spine. The project, which at first glance sounds both impractical and a trifle silly, has in reality a great deal to recommend it to the enthusiastic interest of all lovers of the out-of-doors, all conservationists, all believers in the increased need, as our civilization speeds up, of periodic vacations to the wilderness.

The Appalachian Trail would exist in its entirety chiefly for a sjaiibol — that is, nobody, or practically nobody, would ever tramp more than a fraction of its length. But if it existed, and if each individual section were built and maintained (as will have to be the case), by a local organization or organizations, these organizations would be spurred to do their task well by the thought that they made the necessary link in the long chain; and, further, by gathering these organizations together for conferences, the people of the East would come more and more in touch with all that was being thought and done in the field of recreational conservation.

For, ultimately, the Long Trail would be a sky-borne symbol of recreational conservation, physical and spiritual. All through the southern Appalachians, whether it follows the Great Smokies or the

Blue Ridge across North Carolina, and up through Virginia, the Trail will open up a wilderness which has got very speedily to be put into the National Forest domain, or serious consequences will follow. It is a region of extraordinary floral richness and scenic beauty, but at present for the most part inaccessible to any but the hardiest trampers, and even they would find the task of following the sky-line ridge practically impossible. In that land of copious rain, the laurel and rhododendron " hells " are the equal of any tropic jungle growth for stopping progress and bewildering the stranger who penetrates into them. If, however, the aid of the southern mountain men could once be secured to open a trail along the range, and trampers from the plains, from all parts of the country, could get up on those splendid peaks (North Carolina has several mountains higher than Mount Washington), and could drop down into those wild, deep coves between, where the clear brown water tumbles and the wild flowers riot, and the great hardwoods rise tall and straight as masts (when the lumbermen haven't been in) , and in sudden clearings, come upon without warning, the rough gray cabins of the mountain folk doze under pink geysers of peach blossoms, there would be a national awakening to the beauty of our southern highlands, and certainly the dim beginnings of an awakening to the need for forest conservation. Side trails, of course, would lead down to such points as Asheville and Virginia Hot Springs. The Long Trail would be made accessible in sections. It would, properly laid out, open a vast region for recreation, and form the necessary entering wedge of the forest conservation drive. For, be it noted, j^ou can talk forest conservation till you are exhausted, without results. But take your man into the wilderness, on a tramp, show him the woods, the falling water, the richly clothed mountain slopes; and then the naked scar of a typical lumber job, the slash, the fire, the dried-up brook bed, the washed- or burnt-out soil, the rich earth made desert for a hundred years — and you have accomplished what argument cannot do.

I am getting a bit nearer home, now, and the end of my digression. It is planned to bring the Appalachian Trail into New England from New York State near the town of Kent, Connecticut, taking it through a Connecticut State reservation at that point. It Avill then come up along the hills, through a beautiful, high country easily accessible from the Housatonic vallej^ for week-end tramping, being but two or three hours removed from New York City, and will enter INIassachusetts along the ridge of INIount Everett. One would naturally suppose that the Mount Everett Reservation commissioners would awake sufficiently to carry it over the Dome and around the shore of Guilder Pond, where lean-to shelters would be constructed similar to those of the Appalachian Club in the White Mountains, and proper fire j)its and camp facilities provided. From this point to Greylock, the route of the Trail is, as I write, problematical (for that matter, the whole Trail is problematical!), and the possibilities oj)en interesting discussion.