The Boys Walking on the Snow Cornice of Garfield Peak. (Enlarged from a Movie)
“Come on, boys, let’s get this Pearl White stuff over,” the doctor laughed.
They scrambled up around the side to the very peak, and waited till they heard the signal. Then one by one they walked forward toward the edge. The doctor led the way, and sounded with his alpenstock. He stopped five feet short of the extreme edge, however, turned and walked along that line, the rest following him holding their breaths, and half expecting to go pitching down any instant. But they didn’t. The snow cornice was many feet thick, and would probably have held up a far greater weight.
When they were out of the picture again, they looked around. The view was tremendous, and the first one they had got from a high summit. (Garfield is a shade over 8,000 feet.) To the south they saw the glistening white snow cone of Mount McLaughlin, and then far, far away, 150 miles, floating almost like a cloud on the horizon, the great white bulk of Mount Shasta in California, more than 14,000 feet high. To the eastward, they looked out over the desert country of southeastern Oregon, stretching for endless miles. North of them, they looked right down for 2,000 feet into the blue caldera of Crater Lake. North of the lake, beyond the farther rim, they could see Mount Thielsen, which looked like a huge needle of lava sticking straight up into the air, and beyond that the white pyramid of Diamond Peak. Everywhere near by, on the outer slopes of the crater, they looked down into dark mysterious forests marching up the ravines.
“Well, Bennie, is this big enough and wild enough for you?” the doctor demanded.
“I never saw so much land all at once in my life,” said Bennie, “or such a big hole in it. And to think I’ve seen old Shasta, way off in California! This beats the old geography!”
“You loosed a larynxful then,” came from Dumplin’.
“Not very poetic, Dump, but true,” the doctor smiled.
The boys found the steepest drift on the descent, and tried to ski down it on their boot soles, but they hit such a rate of speed that all three of them toppled over, and landed at the bottom head over heels. After they had reached the open trail once more, Spider cut away from the path, and worked down the side slope, through the pumice drifts and the tumbled piles of broken lava, gathering specimens of wild flowers. You would hardly have supposed anything would grow in such unpromising looking soil, but volcanic stuff rapidly breaks up into a soil rich in chemical plant foods, especially potash, and soon his hands were full. Bennie, who had followed him, began to help, and rapidly got interested in the game of finding new varieties. It was a big bunch they finally brought into camp, half an hour after the rest had reached home.