For the next hour, the horses plodded upward, over deep, hard snow, packed in huge drifts under the evergreen trees, which got smaller and smaller as they approached timber line. What had looked like an easy slope from below turned out to be full of short but steep pitches, over lava ledges, and if it had not been for the snow they could hardly have taken the horses up without endless zigzagging.
It was bright morning when they reached timber line, on the southwestern shoulder of the mountain, but as yet the sun had not reached them, of course, being cut off by the great bulk of the cone. They tied the horses to the last little trees, where the poor creatures would have to stay, without food or water, till night. Then they put on their heavy, spiked boots, shouldered their packs, canteens and cameras, the doctor with his coil of alpine rope, and set out for the summit above them, around which the clouds were scudding at a tremendous pace, driven by a strong west wind.
“How high up are we now?” Spider asked.
“About 7,000 feet, I should guess,” the doctor answered.
“Then we’ve got about 3,500 feet to climb,” Spider reckoned. “That’s not as much as Mount Washington from Bretton Woods or the Crawford House. You climb 4,200 there.”
“It’s 700 feet less,” said Bennie. “Gee, I’m good at arithmetic.”
“The only difference being that this is the second hardest snow climb in the United States (excluding Alaska, of course), and we are tackling it by a route which, so far as I know, nobody has ever tried before,” the doctor smiled.
“What’s the hardest?” Bennie asked.
“The north side of Mount Baker in Washington, up the Roosevelt Glacier,” his uncle answered.
“You been up there?”