For four full days our camp was pitched here. Near at hand were Lake Washburn, the Amphitheatre, and trout fishing. On Lake Merced was launched the famous "Colby Collapsible Canoe," and it collapsed only at proper intervals. Knapsack parties ascended Foerster Peak and Mount Clark, and a band of four hardy mountaineers set out for Mount Ritter, to join us again in Tuolumne Meadows. When Sunday morning came, we climbed straight up the sides of the Lake Merced basin, for over one thousand feet, by what seemed, after a full breakfast, a sort of lifting-by-one's-boot-straps-exertion. The pack animals and a few others went by Vogelsang Pass, but the main party by Babcock Lake and Fletcher Creek. Here we first set our feet in snow and saw near at hand, sharp against the sapphire sky, snowy ridges. There was the zest and sparkle of winter in the air. In beautiful Tuolumne Meadows the party stayed from the twelfth to the morning of the twentieth. Some sat happily in camp. One man insisted that the altitude was so great that it winded him to turn over in bed. Many intrepid souls went to Dog Lake for swimming and mosquito inoculation, to Lake Elizabeth for fish, made the treacherous ascent of Lambert's Dome, or sought Soda Springs for soft drinks. Still others went further afield and climbed Unicorn or Cathedral Peak. One good-sized party ascended Mount Dana, taking two days for the trip. By far the largest side trip of the summer was that up Mount Lyell. At the beginning of the slope, at the eastern end of the meadows, the base camp was pitched. Nature surely never meant that spot for a camping site. Abrupt from the swampy meadow rose the rocky steeps of the range. The women's quarters were on a succession of stony shelves, so narrow that the sleeping bags had to be supported on the outer edge by logs or boulders. Bed was separated from bed by a patch of yet unmelted winter At seven the purposeful party prepared to retire. The night was very cold. By each bed rose, in the motionless air, columns of bright flame from little individual campfires, lighting up the under side of dark evergreen branches above, and revealing among the tree trunks mysterious snow. cowled figures that were settling their domestic arrangements for the night. Later there was silence, dull glowing coals, wisps of floating smoke, the crisp exuberant rush of numerous snow water torrents, hurrying down over the rocks by our pillows, and finally slumber that had almost the quality of gaiety. Abruptly, out of strange joyous nothingness, came from below the long-drawn waking cry, mysterious, dimly apprehended through dreams at first, then taken up and made an intelligible reality by neighbors far and near. Our rocky, forested shelf was dark as midnight, but we knew the hour must be three. High in the sky a clear moon was sailing, and great stars glittered through the black boughs. Dying coals were stirred up into smoky light, numb hands fumbled with shoe laces, and ablutions were made in rushing streams of ice water, perceived not at all by sight, but solely by their whispering, dashing sound, and by the breath of cool spray in our faces as we bent to the sound. Blackness turned to grayness as we rolled our beds and kicked them before us to the commissary below. There in the dawn, anticipating snow-burn, we made our faces strange with grease paint and pot-black. Soup and beans and coffee, taken standing from tin cups, is after all a ghoulish feast at that hour in the morning, and one that could not hold us long. In cohorts of ten, each under competent leaders, every soul numbered and keeping his place, our long line was formed, and we began to step up, up the first incline of the huge mass above and beyond us. Among the rocks there was grass at first, and flowers, hoary with heavy dew, and we crushed these in a narrow trail under our hob-nails and brushed the cold wetness from the bushes with our garments. Soon the sky was flooded with rose and purple hues, succeeded by the sun, beating never more warmly on our backs. On we climbed through stunted tree growth and rocks, then rocks only and increasingly large stretches of snow, leading up to the huge rock pile of Lyell in the distance. This snow had melted unevenly, so that its surface was a succession of pits about a |