“Mazama—sounds sort of Indian.”
“It is—it’s the Indian word for a mountain goat.”
“That’s us,” said Bennie. “When do we leap lightly down the rim to the water?”
“As soon as you’ve washed the dishes,” said his uncle.
The sun was well up when they started, and the chill had gone from the air. You could hardly believe water had frozen two hours before. Mr. Stone carried his movie camera, which weighed fifty pounds, on his back in a knapsack made for it, Dumplin’ carried the tripod, also in a sack, Bennie and Spider carried their canteens filled with spring water, their cameras, and the lunch in knapsacks. The doctor had two canteens and the coil of 125 feet of soft alpine braided rope. Everybody had an alpenstock. As the little procession passed the hotel, the people there looked at them curiously.
“You evidently mean business,” somebody said.
“We’re going down to the lake,” said the doctor.
“I wouldn’t try it, if I were you,” the other man replied. “Two chaps went down yesterday, and they had a pretty bad time. They say it’s extremely dangerous.”
“We’ll take a chance,” said Uncle Billy.
The trail starts down just east of the hotel. It is a wide footpath cut in the soft lava and the powdery pumice and conglomerate of the slope, switchbacking down a sharp ravine. But this ravine was now almost filled with snow, so that the path was buried, and the descent had to be made over the bare snow slope, at an angle of fifty degrees. If you once started slipping, there was nothing to stop you for a thousand feet. The park gang of a dozen men or more, with shovels, were just attacking the snow at the top, shoveling out the path and tossing the snow chunks on to the slope, down which they slid and bounded like a bombardment.