After running for ten miles or so through the forest, while the car and their faces became covered with the white pumice dust, they came suddenly on a beautiful, cold little stream, and beside this stream an open camp ground, maintained by the government for anybody who wanted to use it. Here they stopped for early lunch, under the cool shadows of the great trees.
There were at least a dozen other cars there, and half as many tents were pitched in the woods. Fires were going. Some campers had wash hung out to dry. The camp was clean and well cared for.
“Well,” said Spider, looking around, “all I can say is that Massachusetts has got something to learn from Oregon. If you tried to camp anywhere at home, you’d get chased off. And when the State does get any land for a forest, it doesn’t make any provisions for camping. They won’t let you build a fire. Can’t camp without a fire.”
“Here’s something for you scouts to think about,” Mr. Stone said. “Why don’t you talk up State forests and camp sites when you go home? The Boy Scouts could do a lot if they all got together.”
“You bet we’ll think about it,” Spider said. “Why, there’s a State reservation right near Southmead, and a nice park on it, and the State hasn’t even made a path around the pond so you can get to the water.”
“People in the East haven’t learned how to camp yet, anyway,” the doctor said. “They think they’ve got to have a hotel every fifty miles.”
“Sure,” said Bennie. “Ma’s idea of roughing it is to have hot and cold water and steam heat.”
After lunch they pushed on, and soon began to climb again, up and up, while the radiators boiled in the heat, till they came to the entrance of the Crater Lake National Park, where they stopped to pay the tolls on the cars, and have a tag pasted on the wind-shield. While this was being done, the boys crossed the road and looked down into a tremendous gorge cut by Castle Creek into the lava rock. It was their first real taste of what was ahead. Soon after this, as the road kept on climbing, they began to get glimpses through the trees of mountain tops, covered with snow, and before long the road began to get muddy in places, as if the snow had but recently melted from it.
At last they reached Government Camp, where the Park superintendent and the rangers live, at the foot of the last slope to the rim. Here there were great patches of snow all about in the woods, and trickles of water beside the road.
“Can we get up to the rim?” the doctor called to someone in a doorway.