Joe was still sleepy when the Ranger shook him by the shoulder.
“Get up,” said Mills. “We’re in for a rain before night, sure. I want to get as far as we can before it begins. Get breakfast, and put up some stuff handy for lunch, so you can get it without unpacking.”
Joe crawled out into a new, strange world. For the first time since he’d been in the Park it was not a clear day. The clouds hung low, way down over the tops and sides of the mountains, gray, dull clouds, with ghostly strings of vapor moving around on the under side. Sperry Glacier was invisible, and the vapors were half-way down the wall where the goats had been. Here, in the deep bowl of Avalanche Basin, with its towering, precipitous sides, the result was that Joe felt exactly as if he were shut in down at the bottom of a huge well, a well with a gray smoke cover over it. Even the bright green water of the little lake, without any sunlight, had turned a dull, chalky green, and looked ominous and unreal, as if you would catch dead fish in it.
“I don’t like this—I feel as if I were in a prison,” he said to the Ranger, as he kindled his fire.
“You may like it less before we get to Granite Park,” Mills answered. “Put your poncho over your saddle to-day—you’re going to need it.”
Then he woke the camp.
Everybody felt more or less as Joe did, and breakfast was curiously quiet. Even Bob stopped his gay chatter. They got an early start, and were soon down on the main trail beside McDonald Creek, and plugging north through the deep forest of pines, larches and Englemann spruce. It was dull, monotonous work, with no view at all, for when there was an opening in the woods, all they could see was a cliff wall going up into the gray cloud overhead, which shut down over them like a roof. Mile after mile they went, now and then Bob or the girls starting a song, but soon stopping it. The trail was wet and muddy underfoot, and there were some fallen trees to jump. Moreover, the packhorses were, for some reason, particularly badly behaved that day, and Joe and Val nearly lost their tempers a dozen times as they rode into the brush, to head off some packhorse which was trying to get out of line.
When they stopped for lunch, it had already begun to drizzle. Joe made coffee, and passed out the usual collection of food for a Charlie Chaplin sandwich. By the time lunch was eaten, the drizzle had settled down into a misty rain, and the trees had begun to drip. Then everybody realized why they had been carrying around slickers on their saddles. On went these slickers—long, yellow rubber coats such as are worn by the Gloucester fishermen. They fitted the men all right, but poor Lucy and Alice were completely enveloped, with the sleeves coming down over their hands. Joe put his head through the hole in his poncho—and that was all right till he came to mount his horse. Then he discovered that a poncho is decidedly not the thing for horseback riding, for his knees and legs kept coming out from under, on either side, and as the trees and bushes were soon dripping wet, and the rain kept falling, he was speedily soaked almost to the waist. It grew colder, too. But there was nothing to do but plod on, through the wet, miry trail.
However, very soon after lunch, the trail suddenly left the cañon, and headed east right up the side wall, to Swift Current Pass.
“Less than three miles to camp,” Mills called back; “and three thousand feet to climb,” he added.