Alone with a Landslide
Realizing the importance of traveling as lightly as possible during my hasty trip through the Uncompahgre Mountains, I allowed myself to believe that the golden days would continue. Accordingly I set off with no bedding, with but little food, and without even snowshoes. A few miles up the trail, above Lake City, I met a prospector coming down and out of these mountains for the winter. "Yes," he said, "the first snow usually is a heavy one, and I am going out now for fear of being snowed-in for the winter." My imagination at once pictured the grand mountains deeply, splendidly covered with snow, myself by a camp-fire in a solemn primeval forest without food or bedding, a camp-bird on a near-by limb sympathizing with me in low, confiding tones, the snow waist-deep and mountains-wide. Then I dismissed the imaginary picture of winter and joyfully climbed the grand old mountains amid the low and leafless aspens and the tall and richly robed firs.
I was impelled to try to make this mountain realm a National Forest and felt that sometime it would become a National Park. The wonderful reports of prospectors about the scenery of this region, together with what I knew of it from incomplete exploration, eloquently urged this course upon me. My plan was to make a series of photographs, from commanding heights and slopes, that would illustrate the forest wealth and the scenic grandeur of this wonderland. In the centre Uncompahgre Peak rose high, and by girdling it a little above the timber I obtained a number of the desired photographs, and then hurried from height to height, taking other pictures of towering summits or their slopes below that were black and purpling with impressive, pathless forests.
The second evening I went into camp among some picturesque trees upon a skyline at an altitude of eleven thousand feet above the tides. While gathering wood for a fire, I paused to watch the moon, a great globe of luminous gold, rise strangely, silently into the mellow haze of autumn night. For a moment on the horizon it paused to peep from behind a crag into a scattered group of weird storm-beaten trees on a ridge before me, then swiftly floated up into lonely, misty space. Just before I lay down for the night, I saw a cloud-form in the dim, low distance that was creeping up into my moonlit world of mountains. Other shadowy forms followed it. A little past midnight I was awakened by the rain falling gently, coldly upon my face. As I stood shivering with my back to the fire, there fell an occasional feathery flake of snow.
Had my snowshoes been with me, a different lot of experiences would have followed. With them I should have stayed in camp and watched the filmy flakes form their beautiful white feathery bog upon the earth, watched robes, rugs, and drapery decorate rocks and cliffs, or the fir trees come out in pointed, spearhead caps, or the festoons form upon the limbs of dead and lifeless trees,—crumbling tree-ruins in the midst of growing forest life. To be without food or snowshoes in faraway mountain snows is about as serious as to be adrift in a lifeboat without food or oars in the ocean's wide waste. In a few minutes the large, almost pelt-like flakes were falling thick and fast. Hastily I put the two kodaks and the treasured films into water-tight cases, pocketed my only food, a handful of raisins, adjusted hatchet and barometer, then started across the strange, snowy mountains through the night.
The nearest and apparently the speediest way out lay across the mountains to Ridgway; the first half of this fifteen miles was through a rough section that was new to me. After the lapse of several years this night expedition appears a serious one, though at the time it gave me no concern that I recall. How I ever managed to go through that black, storm-filled night without breaking my neck amid the innumerable opportunities for accident, is a thing that I cannot explain.
I descended a steep, rugged slope for a thousand feet or more with my eyes useless in the eager falling of mingled rain and snow. Nothing could be seen, but despite slow, careful going a dead limb occasionally prodded me. With the deliberation of a blind man I descended the long, steep, broken, slippery slope, into the bottom of a cañon. Now and then I came out upon a jumping-off place; here I felt before and below with a slender staff for a place to descend; occasionally no bottom could be found, and upon this report I would climb back a short distance and search out a way.
Activity kept me warm, although the cold rain drenched me and the slipperiness of slopes and ledges never allowed me to forget the law of falling bodies. At last a roaring torrent told me that I was at the bottom of a slope. Apparently I had come down by the very place where the stream contracted and dashed into a deep, narrow box cañon. Not being able to go down stream or make a crossing at this point, I turned and went up the stream for half a mile or so, where I crossed the swift, roaring water in inky darkness on a fallen Douglas spruce,—for such was the arrangement of its limbs and the feel of the wood in its barkless trunk, that these told me it was a spruce, though I could see nothing. During this night journey I put myself both in feeling and in fact in a blind man's place,—the best lesson I ever had to develop deliberation and keenness of touch.