Unexplored!

Hell-for-Sure Pass was one name that attracted Ace’s eye on the map. He judged that it must mean stiff going, – but even had they actually planned to climb that way, he would have preferred to wait and discover for himself the reason for its nomenclature. There was also Deadman Pass, (another name to tickle the imagination), Electra Peak, Thousand Island Lake, The Devil’s Post Pile, Volcanic Ridge, Crater Creek, Stairway Creek, Fawn Meadow, – and dangerously near, Bear Meadow, – Vermilion Cliffs, Piute Pass, Disappearing Creek, Lost Canyon, Table Mountain, (reminiscent of the Bret Harte days), Deadman Canyon, (flavoring more strongly of the gold days of ’49), and Rattlesnake Creek, (doubtless deserving the title.) – To say nothing of such ordinary features as 13,500 foot University Peak, (a mere wave of the sea of peaks surrounding champions Lyell and Whitney), Diamond Peak, 13,000 feet, Mt. Baxter, likewise around 13,000, Mt. Pinchot, and a score of others (occurring at short intervals in a solid phalanx). Whoever wants to climb a mountain everybody climbs, seemed to be the final verdict of the party. There are other peaks almost as high as Whitney, (certainly quite high enough to suit the most fastidious sportsman), and probably even more difficult of ascent. Why not discover something new under the sun? In other words, why not strike off at random into the Unexplored? They would head right into the thick of the thickest green patch on the map, and wander as fancy dictated. If they felt like climbing, they would climb. If they felt like lazing, (as Pedro put it), they would laze. If they came to a river they could cross, all right. If they could not cross, why, all right, who cared?

There was rumor of vast caves that riddled the back country. There were hot springs, soda springs, – who knew what? Good pasturage was never hard to find. The verdant meadows left by the glacier lakes could be counted on up to the very backs of the 9,000 foot ridges. Most of them were half to a mile wide, and at the head waters of the big rivers, they had heard, were meadows nearer ten miles in length.

With one exception, every lake in the Sierras is a glacier lake (that exception being Huntington, a “made” lake four miles long that falls three thousand feet through a flume to add power to an electric plant). These lakes lie all the way up to as high as 8,000 feet above sea-level, Norris’s theory being that in time they will be found higher still. The glaciers left by the last ice age naturally melted first in the lower reaches, and as those that now cap the peaks and flow down between ridges like the arms of a starfish, melt in their turn, they will leave their icy, green-blue crystal pools higher and higher up the mountainsides. Just North of Mt. Ritter, Norris told them, lies a glacier lake at an altitude of 12,000 feet, while the glaciers still to be found are slowly, slowly grinding out the basins of the lakes that will one day, (possibly centuries hence), lie where now linger these evidences of the last glacier epoch.

Where these lakes have in their turn disappeared they have left these rich-soiled meadows. Where these level-lying meadows failed them pasturage for their burros, Norris guaranteed that there would be plenty of hanging meadows, – long, narrow, bowldery strips of weed enameled verdure slanting up and down the moraine-covered canyon sides, beginning away up at timber line, where springs the source of their life-giving moisture.

Before the group broke up that day, word came that Rosa’s brother had broken his leg, there at the fire outlook on Red Top. (A pack-mule had crowded his horse off the trail on the steep slope of an arroyo, and the horse had fallen, though breaking his otherwise sure descent into the creek below by coming sharply up against a tree trunk.)

“The worst of it is,” worried Radcliffe, “with men so scarce, I don’t know who to send in his place. Besides, it’s a week’s horseback trip from here, – and fires breaking every day, – and he needs a doctor.”

It was not till the deed was done that Ace returned to announce, with the smile of the cat who has licked the cream, that Rosa had insisted on taking her brother’s place. He, Ace, had found the spot from her sure knowledge of the topography of the place. (She had kept house there for her brother the summer before, in the wee, wind-swept cabin.) And leaving Rosa there, as she pluckily insisted, Ace brought her brother back, covering in minutes, as the bird flies, what it would have taken a week to traverse on horseback. Those mountain trails corkscrew up and down the canyon sides till instead of calling a certain distance a hundred miles according to the map, one states it, “a week into the back-country,” – or in the case of the trailless peaks, (among which Long Lester felt most at home), the same distance might be a matter of a four-weeks’ camping trip, with no human habitation, and the likelihood of not even a ranch at which to purchase supplies, in between.

Then the Senator sent the ’plane back to San Francisco, and its hangar in Burlingame, before – as he said – his young hopeful could start anything more. He himself was to spend the next month fishing around Kings” River Canyon, putting up at the canvas hotel. But he took as much interest in the camping trip as if he had been a member of it, – as, indeed, did Ranger Radcliffe, though word of a fresh forest fire breaking cut short his part in the powwow.

The question now arose, should they go horseback, or afoot with pack-burros, – a string of which Long Lester yearned to pilot.

True, a mountain-bred pony will hop and slide up and down mountain ledges that would make an Eastern horse’s hair literally stand on end. They have been born and bred to it, physically and mentally. They have been known to sit back almost on their haunches and slide when they could get down no other way. Some of them will walk a log twenty feet above the surface of a stream. (The Eastern rider will find that hard to believe, until he recalls the feats of circus horses.) But not all horses are alike, any more than people. Why should the plains horse and the park horse and good old Dobbin, the farm horse, be equine mountaineers and prospectors?

“Shank’s horses” and the pack-burros won the final ballot, – to Pedro’s open dismay. But they would first ride the well-defined two-days’ horseback trail from Giant Forest to the Kings’ River Canyon, and Giant Forest is an automobile stage ride from Fresno, which is another short day’s ride from Huntington Lake.

(Strange are the threads of destiny! Not one of that group so much as dreamed that they were embarking on anything but a five weeks’ camping trip.)

CHAPTER II

THE CAMPING TRIP

A week later Morris and the boys arrived at the lumber camp on the Canyon rim, where they were to await Long Lester, – Ace in a piratical and plutocratic black Stetson sombrero, hiking boots and flannel shirt, a red bandanna at his throat, and to supplement his khaki riding breeches he had bestowed lovingly in his duffle bag the Mexican leather chaps. He also displayed the eight-inch leather belt of the cow country, and elbow length leather cuffs studded with silver nails.

Ted let it go at his second best blue overalls and heavy shoes, a green plaid gingham shirt, with a brown one to change off and straw hat. Pedro lounged gracefully about in corduroy trousers and elkskin boots, (which Norris warned him would last about a week on such rough going), and a wool jersey in the same soft tan. He took their guying good naturedly, however, and in mockery of Ace’s more picturesque accoutrement, gave a first class imitation of a motion picture director with the Senator’s son for his prize Bad Man. Norris wore his second best uniform, and all had sweaters and a change of socks and things, to say nothing of an extra pair of shoes.

When word came that the old guide had had “some investment business” come up to delay him, they decided to establish a make-shift camp. There was not one chance in a hundred of any rain, but they decided a lean-to would be convenient anyway. They got some shakes of an old lumberman whose function it was to split the giant shingles from three foot lengths of log.

Four poles for corner-posts made a substantial beginning. Smaller ones morticed to lie crosswise gave something to which to nail the shakes, which were overlapped shingle-fashion on both sides and roof. The tarpaulins would make a curtain across the front. The floor was bedded down a foot deep with springy silver fir boughs, laid butts down and toward the foot. To this could be added fresh browse as it grew dry and harsh.

Tables were made by borrowing a saw of the lumbermen and slicing a four foot log into eight inch slices, then gouging these out on the under side so that stout legs could be fitted in. Stools were made from short lengths of a smaller log, and behold! the open air dining-room and kitchen were furnished, at cost of a few hours’ fun.

Norris even made a sort of steamer chair of poles, using a double thickness of his tarp for the seat and back.

Next came a stone fireplace, with an old piece of sheet iron across the top, and a great flat hearth-stone on which to warm the plates.

Each tin can as it was opened had its top neatly removed and was washed and set aside as a chipmunk-proof container, and Pedro fashioned a refrigerator by replacing the two sides of a cracker box with screen wire, (bartered from the cook of the lumber camp), hinging the door with discarded shoe tongues.

Cord was strung for clothes-line, and a supply of several kinds of fuel brought in. The down logs were simply run into the fireplace, butt ends first, and shoved closer as they burned. Ted devised a rake for gathering together the dry twigs and cones and bark with which the ground was strewn, by using nails for teeth, set in a small board fastened at an angle to the stick that served as handle.

Following Norris’s lead, each fellow heated water and took a sponge bath daily, (except Ace, who took a cold plunge in the glacier-cold stream), and afterwards washed out his change of socks and underwear and his towel. The dish-washers also laundered the dish towels after each meal. That way, everything was always ship-shape. And, be it noted, any cook who burned the nested aluminum pans and kettles had to clean them himself, and though Norris had made that easier by bringing along a box of fine steel-wool, it was amazing how few scorched dishes occurred! Of course where pots were used over the fire, the outsides got sooty, but after all, it was only the insides that affected one’s health.

The boys found that they slept warmer by doubling their blankets into sleeping bags, pinning them shut with horse-blanket safety-pins, with their tarps for a windproof outer layer. And many’s the sleeping bag race they ran, – or rather, hopped, to the amazement, no doubt, of the wild folk who very likely watched from the shadows. Agile Ted won the grand prize at one of these stunts by hopping the full length of a fallen log in his bag, without once falling off.

There were also pine-cone battles and bait-casting contests, Pedro excelling in the throw by reason of his big arm muscles. Thus day succeeded cool and perfect day, and night followed star-strewn night, for nearly a week. The tooth-brush brigade sallied forth as soon as the sun began slanting its long morning rays through the forest aisles, and the boys often began nodding at a ridiculously early hour around the bon-fire, tired from their strenuous day in the open. But each day found their spirits higher, their muscles harder, their eyes brighter, – and their appetites more insatiable. Ted was plumping up and Pedro trimming down on the self-same medicine.

The chipmunks soon became so tame that they ran all over the place, over the boys’ feet, on up to their shoulders, and into their pockets for the goodies they sometimes found. But they never ran under any one’s palm. Pedro got one cornered and caught him with his bare hands, and put him on a leash, but the furry mite spent the next half hour straining to get away, too unhappy to eat, – cowering, trembling, when the boys stroked his orange striped back with a gentle finger, – and Pedro finally gave him back his freedom, (and a pyramid of peanuts).

“Camp Chipmunk” it was finally voted to call the place, and the name was inscribed on the side of a huge fallen log with bits of yellow-green live moss.

Though the chipmunks could easily have gone to the creek, as they must have before the boys came, they displayed a preference for drinking out of the same water pail the boys did, and they sometimes took an unexpected and unappreciated plunge bath.

Besides the very tiny chipmunks, there were some of the ground-squirrel size with the same orange and black. They were duller of wit, and more timid, but they used to chase the little fellows to within an inch of their lives. One day a big Sayes chipmunk attempted to fish a cheese rind out of the fireplace. The ashes were still hot, and he plunged into the soft stuff over his head, he was out and away, with a piercing squeal, almost instantly, trailing white ash behind him.

The boys used to bury nuts just to see how fast the littlest chipmunks would smell them out. After repeatedly finding the Dutch oven bread nibbled around the edges, Pedro hung the bread-bag from the clothes-line one night. He was awakened next morning by the shout Ted sent up when he found two chipmunks running down the string and squeezing their way delightedly into the bag.

Some one always had to watch while the meal was being laid, for the mouselike villains would be right up on the table sampling the butter, if some one did not keep an eye out. Or they would climb up the leg of the table and peek over the edge with their beady eyes, wondering how far they dared approach without danger to their agile persons. But the funniest thing was when two chipmunks would quarrel, – as generally happened when one unearthed a nut that another had buried. Nickering in the angriest way imaginable, the two tiny things would come at each other with ears laid back, in what appeared for all the world like a head-butting contest. Around and around they would whirl in a spiral nebula, till one got a head start on a race for home and mother.

Each morning they awoke to the hack-hack-hack of the sawyers and the steady grating of the log saw, the twitter of the donkey engine and the volcanic remarks with which the bull-puncher was urging his team forward. The yellow sunshine sifted aslant through the giant trees, birds sang, and chipmunks chattered. A water-packer passed them one day with his mule plodding along under 40 gallons disposed in canvas bags on a wooden frame, and beyond, across the singing creek, they could see the swampers burning the brush they had cut from the pathway of the tree next to fall.

Breakfast dispatched, the boys hurried over to watch the two-bitted axe biting its huge kerf in the side of a ten-foot trunk. When it had eaten a third of the way through the giant trunk, the sawyers began on the opposite side, nearly as high as the top of the kerf, resting the long instrument on pegs driven into two holes that had been bored for the purpose. Iron wedges were driven after the saw. The instant the tree began to lean, the head chopper had driven a stake about 150 feet from the base on the side of the kerf, declaring that the falling tree would drive that stake into the ground, so accurately could they gauge the direction of its fall. The swampers had cleared the way between. Then came the cracking of neighboring branches, as the mammoth trunk swayed and toppled to the forest floor. There was a crash that shook the ground, which rebounded with a shower of chips and bark dust, and the stump gaped raw and red where for perhaps 2,000 years it had upborne the plumed Sequoia Gigantea.

The boys, far above whose heads the fallen trunk towered, scrambled up the rough bark and raced each other up and down the novel roadway that it made. Then, the excitement over, they suddenly realized that they were hungry and ran another race back to camp.

Later they watched as the donkey engine, stronger than ten oxen, was made fast to a stump and stoked till it could move itself into position to haul the log lengths to the waiting ox team. Peelers with axes and long steel bars had been peeling off the thick red bark, which the boys found could be whittled into odd shapes and rubbed velvety at the cut ends. The sawyers were sawing the trunk into lengths short enough to ride on box cars, and the chain tenders were driving the “dogs” or steel hooks into the forward segment preparatory to attaching the chain that was to draw the log after the panting donkey engine. The block shifter was ready with his pulley, and the gypsy tender was gathering down wood.

Suddenly, just as the chain had stretched till the log began to move, some weak link snapped and with a rebound like that of a cannon it flashed over the hillside, catching one man and toppling him over with a broken leg. The camp cook, whose accomplishments varied from the ability to deliver an impromptu and usually unsolicited sermon to that of calling off the numbers at a stag dance, was summoned in haste and from a long black bag that went with the framed diploma that hung at the head of his bunk, this unusual individual administered surgical treatment. The injured man took it philosophically, – his out of door constitution would repair the damage with more than average speed, – and the work of getting out the big log proceeded as before.

They also watched, fascinated, as the logs at a camp further back were sent down a crude slide that slanted sheer to a sizeable lake. Ace threatened to try riding a log some time, but Norris rendered one of his rare ultimatums on that score.

“Let’s take plenty to eat!” bargained Pedro, who was beginning to suspect it was no afternoon stroll he had embarked upon. “Hadn’t we better ’phone old Lester to lay in some extra supplies?”

“There is always fish,” Norris reminded him.

“One gets tired of fish. I say let’s take plenty of grub, if we’re going away off where for weeks we may not see a living soul to buy a pound of bacon of. Eating’s half the fun of camping. And if we get up there on the John Muir Trail, we can’t even catch fish, can we – always?”

“That’s the stuff!” seconded Ace. “If we aren’t tied too tightly to the problem of rustling grub, we will be freer to roam where we please. But gosh! Won’t it take a whole train-load of burros to pack enough stuff? Five men, three times a day, that’s fifteen meals. And thirty days would make it 450 meals. Besides we’ll eat just about double the normal number of calories, – the way I feel already. And twice 450 meals is 900.”

“Whoa, there!” begged Norris. “How much can a burro carry, anyway? We can’t take all our food, or we’ll have such a pack-train we won’t have time for anything but donkey driving, and if we carry feed to keep them going on the trail, we’ll have to take more burros to pack the feed, and they will have to have feed too, and – there’s no end to it.”

“Well, of course we’ll fish, when we can,” amended Pedro. “And we can take compact rations, dried stuff, instead of watery canned goods. They’re just as good, aren’t they? Only the water’s been taken out of them, and we can put it back in each night before we eat it. What’s the use of packing tin cans that are mostly full of water?”

“I wouldn’t call canned peaches mostly water,” retorted Ace, who though less dependent than the plumper Pedro on his three square meals per day, was even more particular what those three meals tasted like.

“It isn’t only the juice,” said Pedro. “The peaches themselves are half water. Dried peaches are the same thing except for that, and two pounds of dried peaches will go a whole heap farther than a two-pound can, let me tell you!”

“All right,” said Ace. “Dried peaches! What else? Mr. Norris, you’ve had a lot of experience on these back-country trips.”

“H’m!” said the young Survey man, his eyes lighting reminiscently. “Did you ever eat black bean soup with salt pork and garlic to flavor it?”

“I have,” said Pedro. “It’s a meal in itself, with black rye bread and dill pickle. And what about fried frogs’ legs and watercress? Broiled mushrooms, stewed mushrooms and onions, and crayfish soup?”

“Sounds good to me,” Ace admitted. “But have we a mushroom expert in our midst? I’m not ready to commit suicide just yet.”

“Nor I,” laughed Norris.

“Nobody asked you to,” Pedro looked aggrieved. “Goodness knows I’m no expert, but I do know a few kinds, and I know those few kinds for sure.”

“Hot dog!” commented the Senator’s son. “Go to it, ol’ boy!”

“Then,” Norris continued, “there’ve been times in my life when I didn’t turn up my nose at corned beef hash browned.”

“And spuds!” Ace completed the recipe. “And onions.”

“Dehydrated,” Norris admitted. “Can’t carry potatoes for more than the first few days, and dried onion is just as flavorful as fresh.”

“An onion a day – ” began Ace.

“Keeps everybody away,” finished the young Survey man laughingly. “And that reminds me of apples, – dried apple pie, apple pudding, apple dumplings, (baked or boiled), apple fritter, (made with pancake flour), and apple pan-dowdy with cinnamon.”

“Pan-dowdy!” queried both boys.

“Yes, when the cook has to roll it out with a bottle, or an oar handle, or a smooth stone instead of a rolling pin, and perhaps bake it in the frying pan, and he hesitates to label the result, he terms it pan-dowdy, and then nobody has any kick coming if it isn’t exactly flesh, fish or fowl, if you get me.”

“We get you!” grinned Ted, who had thus far been a silent partner to the plans. But as usually happened at such times, he had been doing a lot of thinking. He now added his contribution: “How about rainbow trout broiled with pork scraps, and served with horseradish? Let’s take a bottle of horseradish.”

“Dried horseradish and a grater,” amended Pedro.

“All right. Then there’s trout baked with tomato and onion sauce, trout baked in clay, trout boiled for a change, with lemon, (we could start the trip with a few), trout skewered, griddled, baked in ashes, baked on a stone, fried – of course, and roasted and stuffed with sage. Let’s take sage. Then how about cold boiled trout salad with mustard dressing, and fish chowder a la canned milk, with dry-dated – what do you call it? De-hydrated potatoes and evaporated onions? Eh? And garlic isn’t such a bad idea. It’s the handiest little bit of flavoring I know of, – if we all go in for it alike.”

“We’ll all go in for it good and strong,” winked Ace.

“Strong is the word,” chuckled Norris.

“Anyway,” Ted defended his suggestion. “I’ve camped through the back-country a heap in my time, and I’ve generally found it isn’t the sameness of the fish-three-times-a-day that lays you out, but the lack of flavorings. Now I even take caraway seed to give a different flavor to a batch of biscuit, and raisins, or some anise seed, or a little strong cheese, that you can grate into it or on it and then toast it till it melts. Then there’s cinnamon and cheese toast for dessert, and plain cinnamon and sugar melted on white bread makes it just bully! And why do we have to eat white bread all the time anyway?”

“Of course we’ll have cornmeal and buckwheat in our pancake mixture,” said Norris.

“Bully! But why not take part rye flour too, and part oatmeal to mix in? It bakes fine and flaky. And there’s oatmeal cookies mixed with peanut butter and sweetened!”

“Good!” Norris pronounced.

“Y’r all right, kid!” Ace thumped affectionately on his thin shoulder blade, “y’r all right,” but at the threatened repetition of the bearlike caress, Ted dodged.

“Another idea,” Pedro broke in. “Why eat bread all the time anyway? Why not macaroni and cheese, and spaghetti and tomato paste?”

“And garlic?” teased Ace.

“Surest thing you know! And vermicelli, and noodles, and all those things. They’re all made of flour, and they’re different.”

“A little bulky,” protested Norris.

“Oh, well, for the start of the trip, then. They’re not so heavy, parked up on top of a burro’s regular pack.”

“Good!” agreed the leader of the expedition. “We may come to cattle ranches where we can get beef and mutton occasionally, though not after we get into the higher altitudes. And we can start off with a few fresh eggs, for compactness and safety broken a dozen at a time into glass jars. After that – I don’t know whether you fellows would like scrambled eggs or not, made of egg powder. Personally I don’t. Nor the famous erbswurst.”