With the Sierra Club in the Kern Canon. 29 



ties and dangers far greater than any to be found on 

 Whitney. Our approach was from the south, where a 

 rocky spur seemingly afforded easy access to the main 

 body of the mountain. Almost at once, however, we 

 found ourselves in a short but very treacherous chimney 

 where every moment we were menaced with that gravest 

 of dangers to a large party, falling rocks. In mountain- 

 climbing many places which may be surmounted with 

 ease and safety by two or three climbers may become 

 veritable death traps where thirty or forty people are 

 concerned; and so, though probably not many of the 

 novices appreciated it, the few minutes in that chimney 

 were much more hazardous than the dramatic climbing 

 we encountered on the knife-edge connecting our spur 

 with the mountain proper. 



I think few of us will ever forget the first glimpse of 

 that wicked, crumbling knife-edge that we caught from 

 the high pile of rocks above the chimney — half a mile, or 

 more, of it, sapped right and left by the snows that, gath- 

 ering in the vast cirques at its base, insidiously loosen 

 and undermine the great boulders, leaving them, after the 

 thaw, so lightly poised that a touch might set them loose. 

 Its great advantage, however, lay in the fact that our 

 line of progress led along its crest, where a loosened rock 

 might crash its harmless way down the precipice with- 

 out danger to the climbers who were now behind instead 

 of beneath its course — always providing that it did not 

 carry a climber with it. This last danger, indeed, and 

 the necessity for carefully testing the stability of each 

 rock before venturing its support for hand or foot, 

 wrought in some of us such excess of caution that we 

 could scarcely induce our reluctant limbs to move at all. 

 It seemed the wildest of follies to stir a hairbreadth from 

 the hand- or foot-hold which had proved firm toward the 

 untried possibilities that the next step held. Slowly, and 

 with the greatest care, we crept, crawled, and clambered 

 along that knife-edge, some of us grimly silent, some 

 amazingly voluble, while far below us the voice of Stub, 



