ca) 
SS) 
The Mountaineer 
The following day Miss Lulie Nettleton, Mr. Gorton and 
Mr. Bennett made a second climb of the mountain, leaving 
Morrison Creek camp at four fifty-five, following the even snow 
slopes of the south side and reaching the summit at eleven. 
They spent two hours on top, then coasting most of the way, 
came down more than five thousand feet in forty-five minutes, 
returned to our eamp of the night before for an hour’s rest 
and joined the main party at Trout Lake thirteen miles farther 
on, coming in just as camp-fire was over. 
Camp was three miles out from the settlement at Trout 
Lake. m a beautiful grove of pine and larch in the lava cave 
region ‘he largest cave visited appeared from the surface 
as a great nole in a heap of rocks. Two ladders led down into 
it and then with the help of pitch pine knots, we followed over 
sharp rocks a vaulted passage wide and high for several hun- 
dred feet to where it branched into smaller archways. This 
region is full of caves which seem like great bubbles in a stream 
of lava that once flowed down from Mt. Adams to the Columbia 
river. In the vicinity of our camp another smaller cave was 
found and explored and it was said two hundred others had 
been counted. So numerous are they and their openings so 
hidden in the grass and rocks that a horseback rider at night 
is in danger. Water has seeped into some and frozen into great 
pipe-organ columns or stalactites and stalagmites of ice that 
the heat of summer never overcomes. 
The trail from the ice cave to Oklahoma ranger’s station, 
where the next night’s halt was made, was one recently built 
and led across a ridge into the valley of the Little White Sal- 
mon through beautiful forests of white pine and fir. The milder 
character of the country made the trip of the last few days 
seem more like local walks than the real mountaineering of 
the summer’s outing. By this time, too, our company was much 
reduced because a number had gone home early from Trout, 
Lake. 
The last day the trail widened into the road, the foot log 
into the strone bridge, farm houses were passed at intervals 
until finally the whistle of a locomotive was heard and we 
knew the solitude of the hills was ours no more. At a sharp 
bend in the road, high on the hillside we caught the first glimpse 
of the mighty Columbia. <A last night was spent on its banks, 
