And it turned out that they didn’t, much to Bennie’s disgust. To reach the base of the cliffs, it was necessary to climb for 300 yards or more up a pile of rocks, of all sizes and shapes, which in ages past had been broken off from the precipice above, and now lay in a vast heap at the base, making a kind of wild, irregular stairway, and just about as steep as a flight of steps. Bennie had hoped that these rocks would be packed over hard with snow, so they would need to cut steps up the slope. But, alas! it takes far deeper snows, and snows that do not melt in spring, to form such a slope.
What they found, instead, was that the snow had filled in between the rocks just enough so you couldn’t tell whether your foot was going to sink six inches or six feet, and blown off the top of the rocks, making them slippery as glass. Of course, they had to leave their snowshoes at the base. To get up the pile meant nothing more than hard work and scraped shins. Billy and Tom, the two other scouts who had come along, began to complain.
“Say, is this your idea of fun?” said Tom. “You don’t need a rope for this, you need shin guards.”
“Yeah, where’d you get this Alpine stuff, anyhow?” said Billy, as one foot went down between two hidden stones and he half disappeared from sight.
“You wait till we get to the old cliff up there!” Bennie answered hopefully.
The party paused and took a look at the cliff wall, now towering just above them. They had all climbed the mountain many times by the path, but none of them, not even Mr. Rogers, had ever tackled the cliff face. It was 200 feet high, most of it a sheer precipice, and nobody in town had ever dreamed of trying to climb it.
“Gosh!” Tom exclaimed. “We can’t climb that!”
“Well, we’re going to try,” Bennie replied. “It’s not a patch on a lot in that book, is it, Spider?”
“You’ve said it,” Spider answered.
After a few minutes more of hard scrambling, they stood directly under the face of the precipice. Being straight up, it was quite bare of snow, except on a few ledges here and there, and at this point nobody could have climbed it. There was nothing to get even a finger hold on.