The question isn't what is there to do. It is which of the countless things there are to do are you going to choose to do? When Mr. Roosevelt goes to the National Forests, he strikes for the Holy Cross Mountain and bags a grizzly. When ordinary folk hie to this Forest, they take along a bathing suit and indulge in a daily plunge in the hot pools at Glenwood Springs. If the light is good and the season yet early, you can still see the snow in the crevices of the peak, giving the Forest its name of the Holy Cross. People say there is no historic association to our West. Once a foolish phrase is uttered, it is surprising how sensible people will go on repeating it. Take this matter of the "Holy Cross" name. If you go investigating how these "Holy Cross" peaks got their names from old Spanish padres riding their burros into the wilderness, it will take you a hard year's reading just to master the Spanish legends alone. Then, if you dive into the realm of the cliff dwellers, you will be drowned in historic antiquity before you know. In the Glenwood Springs region, you will not find the remnants of prehistoric people; but you'll find the hot springs.
Just two warnings: one as to hunting; the other, as to mountain climbing. There is still big game in Colorado Forests—bear, mountain sheep, elk, deer; and the ranger is supposed to be a game warden; but a man patrolling 100,000 acres can't be all over at one time. As to mountain climbing, you can get your fill of it in Grand Cañon, above Ouray, at Pike's Peak—a dozen places, and only the mountain climber and his troglodyte cliff-climbing prototype know the drunken, frenzied joy of climbing on the roof of the earth and risking life and limb to stand with the kingdoms of the world at your feet. But unless you are a trained climber, take a guide with you, or the advice of some local man who knows the tricks and the moods and the wiles and the ways of the upper mountain world. Looking from the valley up to the peak, a patch of snow may seem no bigger to you than a good-sized table-cloth. Look out! If it is steep beneath that "table-cloth" and the forest shows a slope clean-swept of trees as by a mighty broom, be careful how you cross and recross following the zigzag trail that corkscrews up below the far patch of white! I was crossing the Continental Divide one summer in the West when a woman on the train pointed to a patch of white about ten miles up the mountain slope and asked if "that" were "rock or snow." I told her it was a very large snow field, indeed; that we saw only the forefoot of it hanging over the edge; that the upper part was supposed to be some twenty miles across. She gave me a look meant for Mrs. Ananias. A month later, when I came back that way, the train suddenly slowed up. The slide had come down and lay in white heaps across the track three or four miles down into the valley and up the other side. The tracks were safe enough; for the snow shed threw the slide over the track on down the slope; but it had caught a cluster of lumbermen's shacks and buried eight people in a sudden and eternal sleep. "We saw it coming," said one of the survivors, "and we thought we had plenty of time. It must have been ten miles away. One of the men went in to get his wife. Before he could come out, it was on us. Man and wife and child were carried down in the house just as it stood without crushing a timber. It must have been the concussion of the air—they weren't even bruised when we dug them out; but the kid couldn't even have wakened up where it lay in the bed; and the man hadn't reached the inside room; but they were dead, all three."
And near Ouray another summer, a chance acquaintance pointed to a peak. "That one caught my son last June," he said. "He was the company's doctor. He had been born and raised in these mountains; but it caught him. We knew the June heat had loosened those upper fields; and his wife didn't want him to go; but there was a man sick back up the mountain; and he set out. They saw it coming; but it wasn't any use. It came—quick—" with a snap of his fingers—"as that; and he was gone."
It's a saying among all good mountaineers that it's "only the fool who monkeys with a mountain," especially the mountain with a white patch above a clean-swept slope.
And there is another thing for the holiday player in the National Forests to do; and it is the thing that I like best to do. You have been told so often that you have come to believe it—that our mountains in America lack the human interests; lack the picturesque character and race types dotting the Alps, for instance. Don't you believe it! Go West! There isn't a mountain or a forest from New Mexico to Idaho that has not its mountaineering votary, its quaint hermit, or its sky-top guide, its refugee from civilization, or simply its lover of God's Great Outdoors and Peace and Big Silence, living near to the God of the Great Open as log cabin on a hilltop capped by the stars can bring him. Wild creatures of woodland ways don't come to your beck and call. You have to hunt out their secret haunts. The same with these Western mountaineers. Hunt them out; but do it with reverence! I was driving in the Gunnison country with a local magnate two years ago. We saw against the far sky-line a cleft like the arched entrance to a cave; only this arch led through the rock to the sky beyond.
"I wish," said my guide, "you had time to spend two or three weeks here. We'd take you to the high country above these battlements and palisades. See that hole in the mountain?"
"Rough Upper Alpine meadows?" I asked.
"Oh, dear no! Open park country with lakes and the best of fishing. It used to be an almost impossible trail to get up there; but there has been a hermit fellow there for the last ten years, living in his cabin and hunting; and year after year, never paid by anybody, he has been building that trail up. When men ask him why he does it, he says it's to lead people up; for the glory of God and that sort of thing. Of course, the people in the valley think him crazy."
Of course, they do. What would we, who love the valley and its dust and its maniacal jabber of jealousies and dollars do, building trails to lead people up to see the Glory of God? We call those hill-crest dwellers the troglodytes. Is it not we, who are the earth dwellers, the dust eaters, the insects of the city ant heaps, the true troglodytes and subsoilers of the sordid iniquities? Perhaps, by this, you think there are some things to do if you go out to the National Forests.