s to this road,
going up the canyon from south to north.

The great surprise in the National Forests of New Mexico is the great
plenitude of game; and I suppose the Pecos of New Mexico and the White
Mountains of Arizona are the only sections of America of which this can
still be said. In two hours, you can pull out of the Pecos more trout
than your entire camp can eat in two days. Wild turkey and quail still
abound. Mountain lion and wildcat are still so frequent that they
constitute a peril to the deer, and the Forest Service actually needs
hunters to clear them out for preservation of the turkey and deer. As
for bear, as many as eight have been trapped in three weeks on the
Sangre de Christo Range. In one of the canyons forking off the Pecos at
right angles, twenty-six were trapped and shot in three months.

Lastly, the mountain canyons of New Mexico are second in grandeur to none
in the world. People here have not caught the climbing mania yet; that
will come. But there are snow peaks of 13,500 feet yet awaiting the
conqueror, and the scenery of the Upper Pecos might be a section of the
Alps or Canadian Rockies set bodily down in New Mexico. And please to
remember--with all these advantages, cheapness, good accommodation,
excellent trails and abundance of game--these National Forests of New
Mexico are only one day from Kansas City, only two days from Chicago,
only sixty hours from New York or Washington, which seems to prove that
the National Forests are as much a possession to the East as to the
West.

You can strike into the Pecos in one of three ways: by Santa Fe, by Las
Vegas, or by Glorieta, all on the main line of the railroad. I entered
by way of Glorieta because snow still packed the upper portions of the
scenic highway from Santa Fe and Las Vegas. As the train pants up over
the arid hills, 6,000, 7,000, 7,500 feet, you would never guess that
just behind these knolls of scrub pine and juniper, the foothills
rolling back to the mountains, whose snow peaks you can see on the blue
horizon, present a heavy growth of park-like yellow pine forests--trees
eighty to 150 feet high, straight as a mast, clear of under-branching
and underbrush, interspersed with cedar and juniper and Engelmann
spruce. Ten years ago, before the Pecos was taken in the National
Forests, goats and sheep ate these young pine seedlings down to the
ground; but of late, herds have been permitted only where the seedlings
have made headway enou