Down the Columbia

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff MT. SIR DONALD, WHICH DRAINS FROM ALL SIDES TO THE COLUMBIA
AUTHOR OF “IN THE TRACKS OF THE TRADES,” “HELL’S HATCHES,” ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1921
Copyright 1921 By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS RAHWAY NEW JERSEY
TO C. L. CHESTER
Hoping he will find in these pages some compensation for the fun he missed in not being along.
The day on which I first conceived the idea of a boat trip down the Columbia hangs in a frame all its own in the corridors of my memory. It was a number of years ago—more than a dozen, I should say. Just previously I had contrived somehow to induce the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to grant me permission to attempt a winter journey on ski around this most beautiful of America’s great playgrounds. He had even sent a Government scout along to keep, or help, me out of trouble. We were a week out from the post at Mammoth Hot Springs.
Putting the rainbow revel of the incomparable Canyon behind, we had crossed Yellowstone Lake on the ice and fared onward and upward until we came at last to the long climb where the road under its ten feet of snow wound up to the crest of the Continental Divide. It was so dry and cold that the powdery snow overlying the crust rustled under our ski like autumn leaves. The air was diamond clear, so transparent that distant mountain peaks, juggled in the wizardry of the lens of the light, seemed fairly to float upon the eyeball.