fact, if you followed up any of these side canyons, you would find
them, too, dotted with ranch houses; but beyond them, upper reaches yet
untrod.

Up to the right, above a grove of white aspens straight and slender as a
bamboo forest, is a rounded, almost bare lookout peak 10,000 feet high
known as Grass Mountain. We zigzag up the lazy switchback trail, past
the ranger's log cabin, past a hunting lodge of some Texas club, through
the fenced ranch fields of some New York health seekers come to this
10,000 feet altitude horse ranching; and that brings up another
important feature of the "tent dwellers" in New Mexico. There is nothing
worse for the consumptive than idle time to brood over his own
depression. If he can combine outdoor sleeping and outdoor living and
twelve hours of sunshine in a climate of pure ozone with an easy
occupation, conditions are almost ideal for recovery; and that is what
thousands are doing--combining light farming, ranching, or fruit growing
with the search for health. We passed the invalid's camp chair on this
ranch where "broncho breaking" had been in progress.

Grass Mountain is used as a lookout station for fires on the Upper
Pecos. The world literally lies at your feet. You have all the
exaltation of the mountain climber without the travail and labor; for
the rangers have cut an easy trail up the ridge; and you stand with the
snow wall of the peaks on your north, the crumpled, purpling masses of
the Santa Fe Range across the Pecos Canyon, and the whole Pecos Valley
below you. Not a fire can start up for a hundred miles but the mushroom
cone of smoke is visible from Grass Mountain and the rangers spur to the
work of putting the fire out. Though thousands of outsiders camp and
hunt in Pecos Canyon every year, not $50 loss has occurred through fire;
and the fire patrol costs less than $47 a year. The "why" of this
compared to the fire-swept regions of Idaho is simply a matter of
trails. The rangers have cut five or six hundred miles of trails all
through the Pecos, along which they can spur at breakneck speed to put
out fires. In Idaho and Washington, thanks to the petty spites of local
congressmen and senators, the Service has been so crippled by lack of
funds that fewer trails have been cut through that heavy Northwest
timber; and men cannot get out on the ground soon enough to stop the
fire while it is small. So harshly has the small-minded policy of
penuriousness reacted on the Service