58 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



The timber rapidly stunted till we were in open groves 

 of balsam only twenty feet high but at least fifty years 

 old. We began to cross little silvery brooks of ice 

 water every hundred feet. The horses were weary and 

 the women were dangling on the horns of their saddles 

 when we reached our camping place, on the shoulder of 

 the Divide where it dips to six thousand feet and crosses 

 from the western range to the eastern. The horses 

 were turned loose and driven up toward the snowfields 

 to graze, their herd bells tinkling. Tents were pitched, 

 balsam beds cut, and supper cooked. The total ab- 

 sence of hard wood in the Park makes cooking a smoky 

 and difficult task, but that is the only drawback to 

 camping bliss. Rills of purest ice water ran past our 

 tents on either side, the lingering northern sunset 

 painted redder the red rocks of the Divide to the east 

 and put a blush on the snow-white face of Heaven's 

 Peak, while under a salmon sky to the south all the 

 huddled mountains twenty miles or more away, in- 

 cluding the precipices of Cannon and the ten-thousand- 

 foot peak of Jackson, were like burnished billows of 

 gunmetal, turning slowly to amethyst. No one thought 

 of the War, no one missed his evening paper. In this 

 exquisite solitude, while night stole over the eastern 

 bulwark and the brooks whispered in the cool dark, and 

 from the ghostly snowfield far above us the tinkle of 

 our herd bells dropped faintly down, it was utterly im- 

 possible to bring the mind to think of "civilization " and 



