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 



