“I never saw such a profusion,” he kept saying. “So many kinds all together, and such beautiful masses of color. Well, well, how little we Americans know about our own country. Tom, I want you to go back East and tell your schoolmates this is a pretty fine land we live in.”
“You bet I will—if I go back,” said Tom. “I like it so much here I may stay forever, and be a ranger, like Mr. Mills.”
“After one winter, you won’t like it so much,” Mills said.
Gradually the trail climbed above the tall timber, and the view opened out. Tom could see they were headed for a big semicircular amphitheatre, cut into the towering rock walls of the Divide, and before long they entered the open end of this titanic stadium. It was a wild, beautiful spot. At their feet was a meadow, covered with yellow dog-tooth violets like gold patterns in a green carpet, and with little pines in it like people walking about. On three sides of them, sweeping around in a semicircle at the end, was a vast precipice, seemingly perpendicular, except for the big shale piles at the base. The top of this cliff was a “castellated ridge,” the term mountaineers give to a summit which is long and level, but broken into little depressions and towers, like the battlements of an ancient castle. At the upper end of the amphitheatre lay a round lake, about half a mile across, and at the upper end of that, right under the shadow of the head wall, was the glacier.
This glacier, snow covered on top, showed a thirty foot wall of green ice on the upright edge, and chunks of this ice were constantly breaking off and floating away in the green water. Hence the name Iceberg Lake.
They rode right up to the shore, and Mills took the horses into a little clump of trees, where there was some grass also, and tethered them.
“Now,” said he, coming back, “to the job. There’s the cliff.”
He led the way, with long easy strides, around the right hand side of the lake, through steep rough going, without any path and amid stubborn timber-line evergreens, till he reached the base of a huge shale and snowslide that stretched right up at an angle of about fifty degrees, Tom estimated, to the base of the jagged precipice. Looking up this shale slide to the towering cliff above, Tom saw the staggering task ahead of them—and his heart went down into his spiked boots for a minute. He could see how they could get up part way, all right, for at first it wasn’t quite perpendicular, and it was full of ledges. But then there seemed to be a sheer rise, with not even a toe hold—“and if you fell—good-night!” he whispered to himself.
But Mills and Dr. Kent were studying the cliff quite calmly.
“I’ve seen the goats come down to that snow-field at the top of this shale, half a dozen times,” the Ranger was saying, “and go back the same way. If we can find their trail, I guess we can make it, though they’ll use an awful narrow ledge sometimes. They get into one or the other of those two big gullies, too, on the way back.”