CHAPTER III 



WINTER MOUNTAINEERING 



AFTER a heavy snowfall, one December 

 A\ morning, I started on skis for two weeks' 

 camping in the Colorado Rockies. The 

 fluffy snow lay smooth and unbroken over the 

 broken mountains. Here and there black pine and 

 spruce trees uplifted arrowheads and snow-cones 

 of the white mantle. On the steep slope, half a 

 mile from my cabin, I was knocked to one side by 

 a barrel mass of snow dropping upon me from a 

 tree, and one ski escaped. As if glad to be off on 

 an adventure of its own, it sped down the moun- 

 tainside like a shot. It bumped into a low stump, 

 skied high into the air and over a tree-top, and then 

 fell undamaged in the deep snow. 



Recovering my runaway ski, I started for the 

 summit of the range, a distance of about nine miles 

 from my cabin. For an hour I followed a stream 

 whose swift waters now and then splashed up 

 through the broken, icy skylights. Then leaving 

 the canon and skirting the slope, I was on the 

 plateau summit of the Continental Divide, twelve 

 thousand feet above the sea. 



This summit moor was deeply overlaid with 



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