see
it in the bleached skeleton spars of the dead forest where the burn has
run. You see it where the wasteful lumberman has come cutting
half-growns and leaving stumps of full-growns three or four feet high
with piles of dry slash to carry the first chance spark. The leaf litter
here would have enriched the soil and the waste slash would keep the
poor of an Eastern city in fuel. Once, at a public meeting, I happened
to mention the ranger's rule that stumps must be cut no higher than
eighteen inches, and the fact that in the big tree region of the Rocky
Mountains many stumps are left three and four feet high. Someone took
smiling exception to the height of those stumps. Yet in the redwood and
Douglas fir country stumps are cut, not four feet, but nine feet high,
leaving waste enough to build a small house. And it will take not a
hundred, not two hundred, but a thousand years, to bring up a second
growth of such trees.

* * * * *

Sitting down to dinner at a little mountain inn, I noticed only two
families besides ourselves; and they were residents of the mountain. I
thought of those hotels back in the cities daily turning away health
seekers.

"How is it you haven't more people here, when the cities can't take care
of all the people who come?" I asked the woman of the house.

"People don't seem to know about the National Forests," she said. "They
think the forests are only places for lumber and mills."

CHAPTER III

THROUGH THE PECOS NATIONAL FORESTS OF NEW MEXICO

The ordinary Easterner's idea of New Mexico is of a cloudless,
sun-scorched land where you can cook an egg by laying it on the sand any
day in the year, winter or summer. Yet when I went into the Pecos
National Forest, I put on the heaviest flannels I have ever worn in
northernmost Canada and found them inadequate. We were blocked by four
feet of snow on the trail; and one morning I had to break the ice in my
bedroom pitcher to get washing water. To be sure, it is hot enough in
New Mexico at all seasons of the year; and you can cook that egg all
right if you keep down on the desert sands of the southern lowlands and
mesas; but New Mexico isn't all scorched lowlands and burnt-up mesas.
You'll find your egg in cold storage if you go into the different
National Forests, for most of them lie above an altitude of 8,000 feet;
and at the headwaters of the Pecos, you are between 10,000 and 13,000
feet high, according a