82 FOREST OUTINGS 



found alive. This is especially true of mountain climbers, and of skiers or 

 other winter sportsmen, often youngsters, who strike off and attempt slopes 

 beyond their powers. 



For those who are fit, the still new world lies open and offers escape. The 

 man who fishes one of the remote lakelets of the high Uintas may not catch 

 any bigger trout or any better fighters than the one who fishes a heavily 

 stocked river from the highway bridge, but he catches them in an unaltered 

 setting and this adds to his joy. The man who packs into the heart of the 

 Gila Wilderness for his hunting may not shoot any bigger deer than the 

 man who knocks them down from near the highway, but he pursues the 

 game in a world where he can still feel like a Kit Carson or a Daniel Boone. 

 The man who climbs the trail up Agness Creek to the crest of the Cascade 

 Mountains may not see any more jagged peaks than along the Stevens 

 Pass Highway, but the environment from which he sees them exhibits no 

 sign of civilization save the dead ashes of a few old campfires and the simple 

 trail which has changed but little since it was tramped out centuries before 

 by the feet of Indians. 



Time is of no consequence in an environment that has been developing 

 through an unbroken chain of natural sequences for millions of years. A 

 man or woman camping among the remote peaks of the High Sierras or 

 on the source streams of the Flathead River finds no jarring sight or sound, 

 no discordant clash with instinctive feeling of oneness with eternal and 

 natural values. Nor does he in that vast Quetico-Superior country that lies 

 astride the Minnesota-Ontario international boundary. This latter country 

 has been described as embracing the most usable, beautiful, and primitive 

 canoe waters left in the United States, with an endless variety of woods, 

 rocky shores, mountains, and lakes. It is less than 24 hours' travel from 

 Chicago, less than 12 hours' from Minneapolis. But except for the airplane — 

 sole rival of the canoe — lakes and rivers provide the main avenues of travel 

 within the bulk of its millions of acres. 



The Quetico-Superior area includes thousands of crystal-clear lakes 

 and hundreds of miles of forest-fringed streams up which canoes of French 

 coureurs du bois once knifed their westward way. Here the canoeist-camper, 

 who has outfitted at a trading post on the fringe of the wilderness, may 



