Boy Scouts in Glacier Park Part 36

Tom woke up now, and they lighted the camp lantern, to peep out into the night.

A voice, half drowned in the roar of the gale, came across from the other tent.

"Say," it called, "what had we better do?"

"Keep in your blankets and hang onto your tent!" Mills shouted back.

"I wonder if he thinks we can call a taxi and drive to a hotel!" he added in a normal tone, that couldn't have been heard two feet beyond the tent flap.

n.o.body slept any more in either tent that night. They were too cold, and too busy bailing out snow that drifted under the tent walls, or trying to peg down the walls or stop up the gaps with the balsam beds. Finally, toward morning, there came a perfect hurricane of wind. The tent the scouts were in swayed, tugged, seemed about to leave its moorings, and in the midst of the gust the occupants heard a snapping sound outside, and a smothered yell.

Mills sprang out into the storm, and a moment later came back with Robert and the two men, all wrapped in their blankets, and powdered white by the brief crossing.

Their tent pole had snapped, and the tent had come down on top of them!

There was no chance of getting it up again then, so the six people all huddled in the one tent, and waited for daylight.

"Anyhow, the more we are, the warmer we can keep," said Robert, who was rather enjoying the adventure. "Go on, Joe, keep your knee in my back, I like it! It's as good as a hot water bottle."

The storm began to abate presently, and as the light brightened outside, Mills, peering out, reported that the snow had stopped falling. With the diminution of the wind, too, the cold lessened, and the noise, and nearly everybody, in spite of the cramped quarters, fell into a troubled, rather restless sleep.

What woke Joe up was the bright daylight hitting him in the eye through a crack in the tent flap.

He extricated himself from between Robert and Mr. Taylor, and pushed his way out. It was a transformed, a wonderful, a beautiful world he looked on! Evidently the sun was up over the prairie, for far down Mineral Creek Canon he could see the top of Cannon Mountain, snow covered, pink and rosy with the light, and Heaven's Peak, a little nearer, was like a great pyramid of gleaming rose crystal. On the ground about him, half covering his fire pit, was almost a foot of snow, which hung on the balsams, was drifted over the fallen tent, covered the rocks, and through which, here and there, rose the stems of wild flowers, their blossoms nodding above the white carpet!

He gave a shout.

"Don't miss this!" he cried. "Gee, it's worth a lost night's sleep, and then some!"

Sleepy, stiff forms emerged from the tent behind him, and gazed at the sunrise over a world that was white with winter, and yet was summer.

Everybody exclaimed with delight--except the Ranger.

"This will make Cleveland hopeless," was all he said, as he began to pull the fallen tent up out of its drift.

"Well, I'm going to name this old camp Valley Forge," Robert Crimmins laughed, as he stamped his feet and blew on his fingers, before picking a wild flower for his b.u.t.tonhole!

CHAPTER XXIII--Up To Chaney Glacier and the Discovery of a Three Thousand Foot Precipice

It was a hard job digging the camp out of the snow, and only the fact that Tom had covered the wood and weighted down the canvas to hold it on gave them dry fuel to cook with. They had no snow shovels, using frying-pans and dippers to clear away the drifts from the fire pit and their packs.

"Valley Forge is the right name," Mr. Crimmins laughed as he stamped his feet and blew on his fingers, as Robert had done.

But the sun was now up, the air was rapidly warming, and while Joe got the breakfast, Mills and Tom waded out through the snow in search of the horses. They had to go a long way, too, for the wise beasts had simply wandered down the trail into the woods, and kept on descending until they had got below the snow line into rain, where the gra.s.s was not covered and they could feed. It was almost two hours later that the Ranger and Tom came driving them back, cross, hungry, and with boots soaked by the snow and clothes soaked by the wet bushes.

So they got a late start that morning.

"We'll go up the Little Kootenai Canon," said Mills, "as far as the old cabin of Death-on-the-trail Reynolds, and see how the land lies for a try at the west wall of Cleveland the next day. If it isn't promising, we can make an afternoon trip up to Waterton Lake, and then come back the next day. If it does look like a try at the big mountain, we can push up the side a way, and make a base camp."

So they mounted, and pushed up through the soft, rapidly melting snow to the top of the ridge where the Divide crosses from the eastern to the western range, and after a short trip through the snow-filled, open meadows of Flat Top, with the little pines and balsams looking like Christmas cards, they began to drop down a more than two-thousand foot slope into the canon of the Little Kootenai River, which flows due north, with Cleveland on the right, and Kootenai and Citadel Peaks on the left. Especially Citadel Peak was superb in its snow mantle, a great, glistening white fortress towering thousands of feet up from the canon.

They reached the old cabin of Death-on-the-trail Reynolds at one o'clock, and found there the ranger for that district.

"How about Cleveland?" Mills asked.

"Getting sort of tired of life?" the other ranger inquired.

"That's what I thought," Mills replied. "Any chance to-morrow?"

"Not much. She'll melt on the lower slopes to-day, but the peak'll not begin cataracting snowslides till to-morrow morning, about ten A.M. Day after you might make it."

"No use--we can't wait that long," said Mr. Crimmins. "I'm sorry, but even the State Department can't control nature."

So, after lunch in the cabin, they left the packhorses behind, and free to travel at a good gait, trotted down the trail to Waterton Lake, a long, narrow, beautiful sheet of green water which stretched away north ten miles, into Canada, and being warm with the ride the two scouts and Robert had a swim--or, at least, they went into the water. They came out before they had swum far, their bodies stung red as boiled lobsters by the cold.

"This Park reminds me of the poem," Robert said,

"'Water, water everywhere, but not a place to swim.'"

Back at the Ranger's cabin, they had a big, leisurely supper, with the Ranger as their guest, and after supper he told them tales of Death-on-the-trail Reynolds, an old mining prospector, who had first built the cabin, and when the Park became national property was made a ranger, and true to his name died in the saddle on one of the trails he had followed so long. This old trail from Waterton Lake south over Flat Top and down Mineral Creek to McDonald Creek, and so to Lake McDonald, was a regular smuggler's route in the old days, the Ranger said, and many a horse had been driven down it in the dark, before the American rangers on one end and the Canadian Northwestern mounted police on the other put a stop to that sort of thing.

That night they slept in the cabin, and early the next day went back in their tracks--the first time they had repeated a trail--reaching "Valley Forge" camp at noon. The snow was about all melted here now, and when Mills pointed up the cliffs to the east, and said Chaney Glacier lay just on the other side, it was voted to camp here once more, and spend the afternoon on the glacier, and the peak above.

"I've never been up that peak," Mills said, "but I have a hunch there'd be some view up there."

Lunch was eaten quickly, Tom got out his rope, and they started.

It was an easy climb, and could have been made without the rope, probably, though the rope was a great help in making speed. After a long grade up a shale slide, and across a snow-field, they reached the base of a rough, jagged cliff, and by picking out upward slanting ledges on this cliff, Tom led the way rapidly upward, Mills keeping the rear of the rope anch.o.r.ed, while Tom anch.o.r.ed the upper end, thus making a rope railing on the outer edge of each ledge. In less than an hour they reached the spine of the Divide, at a col between two higher peaks. This spine was a knife blade, not over ten feet wide, and directly on the east side, with its upper edge so close you could step off on to it, lay Chaney Glacier, a vast field of snow now, with little ice showing, a mile in extent, and sloping downward till the lower end disappeared over the rim of a precipice. Out beyond this precipice, they saw the Belly River Canon, looking straight down it, over the green waters of Glenns Lakes, to the spot where they had camped, and beyond that to the green ocean of the prairies. From here, too, they got a superb view of Cleveland, rearing up, still snow covered, a great pyramid of white.

"Want to go out on the glacier?" the Ranger asked Joe.

"Oh, I don't mind," Joe laughed. "The rope's strong."

Every one did want to go out on the glacier, so Mills roped them all, keeping last place himself, and they ventured out over the apparently unbroken field of snow. But this snow was light and rapidly melting, and they had not gone far before Tom, in the lead, with a sounding staff he had cut before they left camp, detected a frail snow bridge and sent it crumbling down into the creva.s.se, disclosing the green ice walls. One look down this well into the ice decided the party not to venture far over the treacherous field, and they returned to the firm rocks of the Divide, and climbed on up another eight hundred feet to the top of the peak to the south.

The summit of this peak was only about the size of a big table, and to the east it fell away absolutely sheer for three thousand feet to a tiny lake far below, out of which, on the opposite side, shot up the cliff wall of Merritt. The wind was strong up here, and the peak so small that all six lay on their stomachs to peer over the precipice.

"Say, that's a hole in the earth!" Mr. Crimmins exclaimed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Mt. Cleveland and Glenns Lakes]

Robert spit over the edge. "I never spit three thousand feet before," he said. "Want to climb up that cliff with your rope, Tom?"

Tom shook his head. "It couldn't be done, not even by a goat," he said, wisely.

"As a matter of fact, you're right," Mills laughed. "I never even knew that cliff was here, either. This Park hasn't been more'n half explored yet."