the
track three or four miles down into the valley and up the other side.
The tracks were safe enough; for the snow shed threw the slide over the
track on down the slope; but it had caught a cluster of lumbermen's
shacks and buried eight people in a sudden and eternal sleep. "We saw it
coming," said one of the survivors, "and we thought we had plenty of
time. It must have been ten miles away. One of the men went in to get
his wife. Before he could come out, it was on us. Man and wife and
child were carried down in the house just as it stood without crushing a
timber. It must have been the concussion of the air--they weren't even
bruised when we dug them out; but the kid couldn't even have wakened up
where it lay in the bed; and the man hadn't reached the inside room; but
they were dead, all three."

And near Ouray another summer, a chance acquaintance pointed to a peak.
"That one caught my son last June," he said. "He was the company's
doctor. He had been born and raised in these mountains; but it caught
him. We knew the June heat had loosened those upper fields; and his wife
didn't want him to go; but there was a man sick back up the mountain;
and he set out. They saw it coming; but it wasn't any use. It
came--quick--" with a snap of his fingers--"as that; and he was gone."

It's a saying among all good mountaineers that it's "only the fool who
monkeys with a mountain," especially the mountain with a white patch
above a clean-swept slope.

And there is another thing for the holiday player in the National
Forests to do; and it is the thing that I like best to do. You have been
told so often that you have come to believe it--that our mountains in
America lack the human interests; lack the picturesque character and
race types dotting the Alps, for instance. Don't you believe it! Go
West! There isn't a mountain or a forest from New Mexico to Idaho that
has not its mountaineering votary, its quaint hermit, or its sky-top
guide, its refugee from civilization, or simply its lover of God's
Great Outdoors and Peace and Big Silence, living near to the God of the
Great Open as log cabin on a hilltop capped by the stars can bring him.
Wild creatures of woodland ways don't come to your beck and call. You
have to hunt out their secret haunts. The same with these Western
mountaineers. Hunt them out; but do it with reverence! I was driving in
the Gunnison country with a local magnate two years ago. We saw against
the far sky-line a