When I mustered up the courage to open my eyes, it was to discover my mad companion cautiously drawing himself back from the brink. He had stopped, as usual, by throwing himself on his side and digging the edges of his ski into the frozen snow. Although he wouldn't admit it, I am certain he kept going an inch or two more than was his wont, for one long strip of hickory was swinging free beyond the icy edge and the other held by only a thin ridge of hard snow.
While he was still thus poised on the brink of Kingdom Come, or rather the Falls of the Yellowstone, Clark insisted on explaining to me the principle of a parachute cape he had devised for use in such an emergency. He reckoned that it would not only help in checking his momentum at the proper moment, but would also have a tendency to make his landing much less painful in the event he went over. I am wondering tonight if all inventors are like that. Clark is the first genius I have ever known, so I can't be quite sure.
Grand Canyon Station, April 10.
Clark and Smith took me out for a ski-jumping lesson this morning. Clark seems to be rather a star performer in all departments of ski work, but he claims that he is better at jumping than at anything else. What the long, straight drive, hit cleanly from the tee, is to the golfer, what the five rails, fairly taken, is to the cross-country rider, what the dash down a rocky-walled canyon is to the river boatman, the jump is to the ski-runner. But what the foozle is to the golfer, the cropper to the rider, the spill in midstream to the boatman, the fall at the end of the jump is to the ski-man. I saw both the jump and the fall today. Or rather, I saw the jump and felt the fall. If I saw anything at all, it was stars.
The jump is made from a raised "take-off" at the foot of a hill. The steeper the hill the better. The snow slopes up from the foot of the hill to the brink of the "take-off," where it ends abruptly. The jumper goes off up the hill for a quarter of a mile or so, turns round and coasts down at full speed. Leaving the "take-off" at a mile or more a minute, it is inevitable that he must be shot a considerable distance through the air. If he is well balanced at the proper moment he naturally sails a lot farther than if he is floundering and Dutch-windmilling with his arms. Also, he messes himself and the snow up a lot less when he lands.
Considering their short runway and crudely built "take-off," the sixty feet Clark cleared this morning was a fairly creditable performance, though probably less than half what some of the cracks do in Norway. Naturally, I could hardly be expected to do as well as that. It was only on the last of a dozen trials that I managed to coast all the way to the brink of the "take-off" without falling, and even then I was not sufficiently under control to stream-line properly and so minimize air resistance. Under the circumstances, therefore, I am rather pleased with Clark's verdict anent my maiden effort. He said I hit harder and showed less damage from it than any man in the Park.
Grand Canyon Station, April 11.
This morning we went down to Inspiration Point to watch the sunrise. Never before did I realize how inadequate the most pretentious descriptions of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone all are. The greatest of the world's word painters have only succeeded in stringing together a lot of colours like the variegated tags on a paint company's sample sheet, throwing in a liberal supply of trope and hyperbole, making a few comparisons to heaven and hell, sunrise and sunset and a field of flowers, and mixing the whole together and serving it up garnished with adjectives of the awful, terrible, immense and stupendous order.