Camping Above the Yosemite. 



91 



our rations, ladled out from steaming pots by the pretty 

 girls of the Club, who wore bright bandanna caps and 

 aprons and took turns in serving. We learned to sink 

 gracefully down to mother earth without spilling any 

 food from our dishes, and to make a table of our laps 

 or the ground. We learned, or thought we did, to wear 

 our short skirts and high hob-nailed boots with an air 

 as though we had been born to the joy of them; and we 

 noted with amazement the manifold uses of the bandanna, 

 which, as lunch-bag, napkin, apron, night-cap, necker- 

 chief, handkerchief, dust cloth, wash cloth, proved the 

 most indispensable article of camp equipment. We ac- 

 quired new ideas of personal adornment, admiring the 

 grace with which these western mountaineering girls 

 wreathed their sombreros with wild flowers or small 

 brown pine-cones, and brightened their attire with gay 

 scarfs and pretty rakish sweaters. We knew literally the 

 emancipation of having 'only one dress to put on," and 

 the difficulty of keeping that one dress unspotted; and 

 we found it no hardship to wash our washable clothes in 

 the running stream and dry them in the sun and wear 

 them unironed, like Homer's ladies of long ago. 



In command of the expedition was the Club's Outing 

 Committee — California lawyers and business men by pro- 

 fession and mountaineers by election, to whose mild au- 

 thority we all submitted. For two months, ever since 

 the melting of the snows, their packers had been stocking 

 our various camps, carrying in provisions from distant 

 railroad towns ; and now these men waited, with sixty or 

 seventy horses and mules, to pack our dunnage-bags and 

 all the commissary traps up that steep trail and into the 

 High Sierras. Among them but aloof, disdaining and 

 disdained, were three Chinese cooks, especially "Charley 

 Tuck," the indispensable chef who had served the Club 

 during every one of its outings, and who knew how to 

 make "hot-cakes" for a hungry crowd in the open and 

 to bake real bread in flimsy collapsible portable stoves. 

 Fortunately no provision had to be made against wet 



