d will be
hemlock boughs--be sure to lay the branch-end out and the soft end in or
you'll dream of sleeping transfixed and bayoneted on a nine foot redwood
stump. Sage brush smells and cedar odors, you will have without paying
for a cedar chest. If you want softer bed and mixed perfumes, better
stay in Newport.

The Forestry Department will not resent your coming. Their men will
welcome you and help you to find camping ground.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, before the railroads have wakened up to the possibilities of
the National Forests as a playground, how is the lone American man,
woman, child, or group of all three, to find the way to the National
Forests? What will the outfit cost; and how is the camper to get
established?

Take a map of the Western States. Though there are bits of National
Forests in Nebraska and Kansas and the Ozarks, for camping and
playground purposes draw a line up parallel with the Rockies from New
Mexico to Canada. Your playground is from that line westward. To me,
there is a peculiar attraction in the forests of Colorado. Nearly all
are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet above sky-line--high, dry park-like
forests of Engelmann spruce clear of brush almost as your parlor floor.
You will have no difficulty in recognizing the Forests as the train goes
panting up the divide. Windfall, timber slash, stumps half as high as a
horse, brushwood, the bare poles and blackened logs of burnt areas lie
on one side--Public Domain. Trees with two notches and a blaze mark the
Forest bounds; trees with one notch and one blaze, the trail; and across
that trail, you are out of the Public Domain in the National Forests.
There is not the slightest chance of your not recognizing the National
Forests. Windfall, there is almost none. It has been cleared out and
sold. Of timber slash, there is not a stick. Wastage and brush have been
carefully burned up during snowfall. Windfall, dead tops and ripe trees,
all have been cut or stamped with the U. S. hatchet for logging off.
These Colorado Forests are more like a beautiful park than wild land.

Come up to Utah; and you may vary your camping in the National Forests
there, by trips to the wonderful canyons out from Ogden, or to the
natural bridges in the South. In the National Forests of California, you
have pretty nearly the best that America can offer you: views of the
ocean in Santa Barbara and Monterey; cloudless skies everywhere; the big
trees i