148 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON 



dazed and almost incapable of great emotion. So 

 I watched the butterflies. 



Or was it that I lacked training? Might one 

 not need to climb Hood many times for the eyes 

 to grow used to seeing and the soul to feeling 

 such unwonted vastness of expanse, such unac- 

 customed and overwhelming depths *? I have 

 tried a hundred times to recall the emotion of my 

 first moment on the summit, and either I had 

 none, or what I had was an utter weariness of 

 body and a depression of spirit due to a sense 

 of my inability to meet the moment emotionally. 

 I felt in spirit as I felt in body, the body perhaps 

 having much to do with the spirit. 



We started before seven o'clock from Cloud Cap 

 Inn and reached the summit a little past noon, a 

 steady half-day of climb, climb, climb, the last four 

 thousand feet zigzagging across the steep flank 

 of a glacier, the last eighteen hundred feet by the 

 help of a rope from the summit up the sheer ice 

 wall to the peak. I reached the rim of the crater 

 exhausted. Two other strong men of the party 

 came over the rim sick. We had a professional 

 mountain-climber with us who was fresh from 

 the Canadian Rockies and who had come to the 



