Certainly it did not trouble Mills, who was already sound asleep.
CHAPTER XXII—A Blizzard on Flat Top—The Camp is Christened “Valley Forge”
The next day the mountains were still under. It wasn’t raining, but the clouds were a dark, gun metal color, and seemed to rest like heavy smoke on the rocks overhead.
“Nothing doing,” said Mills. “They may be over for two days yet, and it will surely rain. We’ll keep the trail over Ahern Pass, and make Flat Top to-day. All out!”
And it was a strange day that followed. The trail was none too good, with much fallen timber to drive the packhorses around for the first two or three miles, and it very soon got up into a wild, desolate, narrow cañon under the southern wall of Mount Merritt, with the water of Lake Elizabeth beside the path, looking in this gray light under the lowering clouds a sort of dead, chalky green. Beyond Lake Elizabeth the cañon grew steeper and narrower, the cliffs of Mount Merritt went sheer up into the clouds, and on the other side of the valley rose the equally steep walls that were the reverse side of the Iceberg Lake cliffs Tom had scaled. But the tops both of Merritt and these cliffs were hidden in cloud, that swirled and raised and lowered as the upper wind currents hit it. When they reached Lake Helen, at the head of the cañon, where the trail began to switchback up the wall of the Divide, they could see, just under the clouds, poised, it seemed, almost over their heads, no less than four glaciers, one of them apparently hanging on a shelf and ready to fall off at any moment. In fact, a huge cake as big as a house did fall off, and crashed down with a great roar to the rocks below, even as they watched.
“The mountain gnomes are bombarding us!” Mr. Crimmins laughed.
They went steadily and steeply up, on the switchbacks, and reached the top of the Divide at noon. But half an hour before they got to the Divide they were in the clouds, in a thick, damp, chilling fog, that was not rain and yet covered their clothes with drops of moisture, made their hands wet and cold, and of course obscured every vestige of a view.
“Well,” said the Ranger, “here we are on the backbone of the world. Over there is Heaven’s Peak. Just to the left, only a mile away, Tom, is the top of the Iceberg Lake head wall. If it was clear, you could take Joe over and show him where you climbed. But I guess as it is we’ll get down as fast as we can, and not even wait for lunch.”
“Anything to get out of this,” the men said, blowing on their wet, numb fingers.
So they dropped down on the west side of the Divide, getting out of the cloud below timber-line, and stopped while Joe made hot coffee. Then they pushed on down still farther, picked up a better trail in the deep woods in a cañon beside a stream—Mineral Creek Cañon; and turning sharp north, began slowly and gradually to climb again. It was the kind of a day when nobody does much talking, and even the horses seemed to plug dejectedly along. After two or three miles, however, they began to go up more rapidly, out of deep timber, into a region of meadows and low balsams. Joe was the first to smell the balsams, and sniffed eagerly.