NARRATIVE. 7 



up to the timber-line which, in this latitude, is at about 

 11,500 feet. 



Having made a late start, on this first day of the ascent, 

 we covered only about fifteen miles, camping for the night 

 near the head of Chicken Creek. A little beyond this point 

 our road descended abruptly into the West Mancos Canon, 

 thence following that stream up to Jackson's stamp mill, 

 at the very base of Mt. Hesperus. The difficulty of getting 

 our heavy outfit back out of this deep canon seemed so 

 great that we decided to keep on up the ridge, following 

 some old cattle and pack trails as far as it should prove 

 practicable to take the wagon. We succeeded in getting 

 three or four miles further, and made our second camp on 

 the headwaters of a little tributary of the West Mancos 

 locally known as Bob Creek. We had reached an elevation 

 of 10,500 feet and were about two and a half miles due west 

 of the main peak of Mt. Hesperus, but with the deep and 

 rugged valley of Slide Rock Creek lying between. The 

 laborious climb out of this valley with a heavy load of 

 plants, after a day's collecting on Hesperus convinced us 

 that we had made a mistake in not taking the lower road 

 and so pitching our camp in the canon, when the home- 

 ward trip would always have been down hill. 



The region above timber was reached in three different 

 places from this Bob Creek camp, on the southwest face of 

 the ridge between West Mancos and Slide Rock Creeks, 

 which constitutes the westernmost spur of Mt. Hesperus, on 

 the north face of the same ridge farther east near the head 

 of Slide Rock Creek, and on the Bear Creek divide north- 

 east of camp. In all these places the ground was rather 

 dry and exposed. Many interesting plants were taken, but 

 the full glory of the alpine vegetation was not seen till we 



