The Knife-Blade. [Page 178.]
A short distance beyond is Crystal Cave station, where the guide was waiting to take us in charge. He is an intelligent young man who has served an enlistment term in the army, is recently married, very obliging, and proud of being trustworthy.
The scenery here is most beautiful as well as grand. The cañon makes a sharp turn toward the south, and on the north opens out into another cañon of even greater beauty and higher walls, the perpendicular being three hundred feet in places. Crystal Cave is in the hill embraced by the junction curve. The natural entrance is more than two hundred feet above the cañon bed and was naturally approached from above. A short walk up the north cañon, whose name has unfortunately slipped away, was over ice and snow the chinook had failed to reach, and brought us to a long stairway against the wall, which affords a more direct approach than nature gave and is a fair test of physical perfection.
Finally a resting place is reached where the grandeur of the view can be enjoyed; and then a shorter stairway completes the ascent of the wall, but not of the hill, so there is still a considerable upward walk through the forest of tall pines all carpeted with brilliant mats of kinnikinic with its shining leaves, glowing in shades of green and red, trying to rival the bright scarlet berries. The kinnikinic here resembles the wintergreen of the east, while in the mountains in Colorado it grows in the form of a shrub two to three feet in height, but with no variation in the leaf or berry.
At last perserverance is rewarded with a view of the cave buildings and the summit of the hill rising yet higher beyond, and tall, straight pines swaying in the rising wind over all.
One of the two houses was entered and preparations quickly made for entering the cave, the artificial tunnel entrance being only a little distance further on.
The door was unlocked, candle-sticks taken from a shelf within, candles from the guide's supply lighted, and we went forward at last, into Crystal Cave. At the end of the new tunnel, a second door was passed through, which is locked on the inside during the visiting season by the last guide to enter, in order that no chance late arrival may enter alone and be lost.
The first room is a small one at the junction of the natural and artificial entrances, from which we go upstairs to the Resting Room, in the highest level of the cave, and perfectly dry but otherwise of no special interest. After a short rest here we went down stairs at the side opposite that on which we entered, into a passage leading to the cave's first beauty, the Red Room. As the name indicates, the walls are vividly colored and represent the uncertain line which separates the Carboniferous strata from the Triassic rocks. The color is handsomely brought out here in contrast with masses of calcite crystal, so as to present by the combination a charmingly beautiful room, from which we retired, feet first, down a "squeeze" to the Bridal Chamber, where we found ourselves perched on an irregular narrow ledge, high up on the wall, and cherishing a private conviction that exploration had met a checkmate; but the guide reached the floor and my nephew, Herbert, scrambled down with as much ease as the chipmunk he had chased to the house top a while before; so a little application settled the difficulty and re-united the party. The room is an artistic study in red, and the only reason for its being called the Bridal Chamber is that the way out is decidedly more rough and difficult than that by which the entrance is effected; this, however, is an observation not based on official information.
Off to one side of this room is Lost Man's Paradise, also in red and crystal, named in honor of the timely rescue of one who had faced the possibility of becoming a lost soul.