On Mt. St. Helens with the Mazamas. lyi 



An outing may be said to begin when one leaves the 

 train and takes to the open road. So the St. Helens 

 trip was inaugurated at Castle Rock, where we took 

 wagons for the camp on Spirit Lake, fifty miles away. 

 We traveled past the farms on the outskirts of Castle 

 Rock, into a region of melancholy "clearings," where 

 hundreds of tall, blackened stumps, hundreds of acres 

 of arable land now choked with rank, unsightly weeds, 

 told their tales of wastefulness and neglect. In pleasant 

 contrast with the neatly kept farms where we lunched 

 and spent the night. 



We were early under way next morning, now in the 

 forest among beautiful firs and hemlocks, whose branches 

 were so closely interwoven that only little flecks and 

 rays of sunlight penetrated their dense canopy. Here 

 and there the delicate white blossoms of the Indian Pipe 

 lifted their heads above the dark loam of the roadside, 

 or a patch of brilliant red huckleberries or of yellow 

 salmon berries gave pleasant excuse for lingering; and 

 always a tropical luxuriance of ferns met the eye, ferns 

 growing in the crevices of rocks, in the hollows of mossy 

 stumps, even fringing the trunks of the fallen forest trees. 

 Once in the course of the ride we caught a glimpse of our 

 final goal, the lofty peak of St. Helens, rising above the 

 forest-clad hills, faintly luminous in the noonday haze, 

 as impalpable and unsubstantial as a vision. 



In the mid afternoon we reached Spirit Lake, where 

 a cool, delicious spring, a grove of firs, a warm lake for 

 swimming and bathing, and a number of row-boats, gen- 

 erously loaned by a mining company of the district, com- 

 bined to make an ideal camp. We began at once to ex- 

 plore the surrounding country, making trips to Harmony 

 Falls, to the mines across the lake, and climbing the lesser 

 hills and crags near by. 



Our ascent of St. Helens was to take place from the 

 north. In 1898 the Mazama Club conquered the moun- 

 tain from the south, finding it the easiest and least dan- 

 gerous of the snow peaks of Washington, but the northern 

 side was to all our party untried ground. 



