a thrill. Yet, now
that I know it can be done, I may try it again some day. It paid for
itself over and over in scenery, in health, and in thrills. But there
were several times when it seemed to me impossible that we could all get
over the range alive.

We took through thirty-one horses and nineteen people. When we got out,
our horses had had nothing to eat, not a blade of grass or a handful of
grain, for thirty-six hours, and they had had very little for five days.

On the last morning, the Head gave his horse for breakfast one
rain-soaked biscuit, an apple, two lumps of sugar, and a raw egg. The
other horses had nothing.

We dropped three pack-horses over cliffs in two days, but got them
again, cut and bruised, and we took out our outfit complete, after two
weeks of the most arduous going I have ever known anything about. When
the news that we had got over the pass penetrated to the settlements, a
pack-outfit started over Cascade Pass in our footsteps to take supplies
to a miner. They killed three horses on that same trail, and I believe
gave it up in the end.

Doubtless, by next year, a passable trail will have been built up to
Doubtful Lake and another one up that eight-hundred-foot mountain-wall
above the lake, where, when one reaches the top, there is but room to
look down again on the other side. Perhaps, too, there will be a trail
down the Agnes Creek Valley, so that parties can get through easily.
When that is done,--and it is promised by the Forest Supervisor,--one of
the most magnificent horseback trips in the country will be opened for
the first time to the traveler.

Most emphatically, the trip across the Cascades at Doubtful Lake and
Cascade Pass is not a trip for a woman in the present condition of
things, although any woman who can ride can cross Cloudy Pass and get
down Agnes Creek way. But perhaps before this is published, the Chelan
National Forest will have been made a National Park. It ought to be. It
is superb. There is no other word for it. And it ought not to be called
a forest, because it seems to have everything but trees. Rocks and
rivers and glaciers--more in one county than in all Switzerland, they
claim--and granite peaks and hair-raising precipices and lakes filled
with ice in midsummer. But not many trees, until, at Cascade Pass, one
reaches the boundaries of the Washington National Forest and begins to
descend the Pacific slope.

The personnel of our party was slightly changed. O