“We’ll go up the Little Kootenai Cañon,” said Mills, “as far as the old cabin of Death-on-the-trail Reynolds, and see how the land lies for a try at the west wall of Cleveland the next day. If it isn’t promising, we can make an afternoon trip up to Waterton Lake, and then come back the next day. If it does look like a try at the big mountain, we can push up the side a way, and make a base camp.”
So they mounted, and pushed up through the soft, rapidly melting snow to the top of the ridge where the Divide crosses from the eastern to the western range, and after a short trip through the snow-filled, open meadows of Flat Top, with the little pines and balsams looking like Christmas cards, they began to drop down a more than two-thousand foot slope into the cañon of the Little Kootenai River, which flows due north, with Cleveland on the right, and Kootenai and Citadel Peaks on the left. Especially Citadel Peak was superb in its snow mantle, a great, glistening white fortress towering thousands of feet up from the cañon.
They reached the old cabin of Death-on-the-trail Reynolds at one o’clock, and found there the ranger for that district.
“How about Cleveland?” Mills asked.
“Getting sort of tired of life?” the other ranger inquired.
“That’s what I thought,” Mills replied. “Any chance to-morrow?”
“Not much. She’ll melt on the lower slopes to-day, but the peak’ll not begin cataracting snowslides till to-morrow morning, about ten A.M. Day after you might make it.”
“No use—we can’t wait that long,” said Mr. Crimmins. “I’m sorry, but even the State Department can’t control nature.”
So, after lunch in the cabin, they left the packhorses behind, and free to travel at a good gait, trotted down the trail to Waterton Lake, a long, narrow, beautiful sheet of green water which stretched away north ten miles, into Canada, and being warm with the ride the two scouts and Robert had a swim—or, at least, they went into the water. They came out before they had swum far, their bodies stung red as boiled lobsters by the cold.
“This Park reminds me of the poem,” Robert said,