86 FOREST OUTINGS 



The camp that night was at a romantic location. In 1 902, when the sheep 

 were just beginning to penetrate this section of the West, the cattlemen who 

 had been using that range for years took the law in their own hands. They 

 captured a couple of sheep owners and tied them to trees. Then they drove 

 their 2,000 sheep into a corral and slaughtered them before the frantic 

 sheep owners' eyes. About the time the owners expected to share the fate of 

 their flocks, they were untied, given swift kicks, and told to leave the country 

 and never return. The old sheep bones from the massacre of a third of a 

 century before still lay in the corral. 



Next day we rode along just west of the Continental Divide for 25 miles. 

 It was up one pass and down the other side, and up and down, and up and 

 down again. We passed a myriad of small lakes sparkling in the intense 

 sunlight of this high plateau land, 10,000 feet above the sea. 



At the third pass of the day some of us left our horses and proceeded to 

 climb Mount Baldy, from where we looked across to the highest summit in 

 the Wind River Range. Directly in front of us were a half dozen peaks 

 towering above 13,000 feet — Gannet, Fremont, W T arren, Knife, Sacagawea, 

 and Helen. They were so massive and substantial it almost seemed as if 

 they constituted the boundaries of the earth. 



We sat quietly, enjoying the view for more than an hour, until the chill 

 which came with lengthening shadows reminded us what a poor place this 

 would be to spend the night. We dropped down to a meadow where the 

 remainder of our party had already established camp and had quickly 

 caught their limit of trout from a nearby lake which no white man ever 

 before had fished. 



Next morning dawned sorrowfully enough as the last day of the expedi- 

 tion. I left the other members of the party and set out to walk as far north as 

 I could that day and still return by dark to the end of civilization. Again, 

 it was a case of up one pass and down on the other side, all day long over 

 36 of the most splendid miles a human being could know. There were con- 

 tinual alpine lakes among the rocks and meadows, continual stunted pine 

 and spruce and fir. On every side were limitless climbing possibilities, in- 

 cluding opportunities for that greatest of all mountaineering thrills, a first 

 ascent. 



