io WAITING IN THE WILDERNESS 



Wading out into the snow I sat down on my 

 snowshoes and away we went, coasting toward 

 Pacific sea level. Of course I exceeded the 

 speed limit. The smooth slope dropped nearly 

 a thousand feet in a half mile. Toward the 

 bottom I struck the smoothest place of all. 

 Here was a spring that had overflowed before 

 the snow fell and coated the slope with almost 

 smooth ice. Over this icy slope I went like 

 a rocket. Near the bottom it flattened out 

 abruptly and I was shot several feet into the 

 air over a rainbow pathway like a football 

 kicked for a goal. At the highest point I 

 looked down into the tops of timberline trees. 



After twenty or thirty feet through the air 

 I came back to earth and swept forward and 

 downward at a hair-raising pace. One of the 

 dwarfed little trees that barely stuck up through 

 the snow caught into my snowshoe and hung on. 

 The shoe was torn off and left hanging on the 

 tree top, while I tumbled head over heels into 

 four feet of snow. But this was the greatest 

 coast I had ever had. I looked back up the slope 

 along the mark I had made. It would be sun- 

 down in about two hours, and it would take 

 about that long to climb up to the place where I 

 had started to coast. But rescuing the snowshoe 

 I climbed up the slope and slid off the roof of the 

 world again. 



