If a man is hopelessly lost, and if he knows that his companions are sure to look for him, he should stop right where he is when he finds that he is lost, and should camp and light two signal fires, giving a call at intervals.
Go into the Parks and get their encouragement. Among the serene and steadfast scenes you will find the paths of peace and a repose that is sweeter than sleep. If you are dulled and dazed with the fever and the fret, or weary and worn,—tottering under burdens too heavy to bear,—go back to the old outdoor home. Here Nature will care for you as a mother for a child. In the mellow-lighted forest aisles, beneath the beautiful airy arches of limbs and leaves, with the lichen-tinted columns of gray and brown, with the tongueless eloquence of the bearded, veteran trees, amid the silence of centuries, you will come into your own.
Some time the grizzled prospector will lead his stubborn burro down the mountain and cease the search for gold; some time the miner will lay down his pick, blow out his lamp or his candle, and leave the worked-out mine; some time eternal night will come upon the gas- and coal-oil lamp; but our sunny hanging wild gardens—our Parks—are immortal; they will give us their beauty and their inspiration forever.
XIX
THE SCENERY IN THE SKY
This big round world carries in its heights four strange, marked features: the vast records of the Ice King; timber-line, the alpine edge of the forest; the mountain-top regions above timber-line; and, over-rising these, the high peaks. Each of these features has scores of stories and pictures. All four of them are seen at their best in some of the National Parks.
1. TIMBER-LINE
The most telling timber-line that I have seen is on the slope of Long's Peak in the Rocky Mountain National Park. This is a wild place during a winter gale. It is a stirring place at all times and seasons. One day I went up to timber-line on Long's Peak with a number of children. They were interested, and even excited, by the dwarfed and strangely shaped trees. We found a dead pine that had lived two hundred and fifty-eight years, yet it was so small that a boy easily carried it about on his shoulder. Several little girls stood by a living spruce. Every child was taller than the little tree, yet the spruce had been growing when each of their great-grandmothers was born. All timber-line trees are undersized. Most of their ranks are less than eight feet high.
One autumn a grizzly that I was following dug up a number of dwarfed trees at timber-line. I carried these home for careful examination. One of them was a black birch with a trunk nine tenths of an inch in diameter, a height of fifteen inches, and a limb-spread of twenty-two inches. It had thirty-four annual rings. Another was truly a veteran pine, though his trunk was but six tenths of an inch in diameter, his height twenty-three inches, and his limb-spread thirty-one inches. His age was sixty-seven years. A midget that I carried home in my vest pocket was two inches high, had a limb-spread of about four inches, and was twenty-eight years of age.