“I wish I could come all the way!” Joe exclaimed.
Mills laughed another of his silent laughs. “You’re ambitious for a sick boy and a tenderfoot,” he said. “You’ll be sore enough, with fourteen miles, to-night.”
They were getting out of high timber now, into stunted limber pines, which were covered all over with bright reddish-pink cone buds, like flowers, and everywhere in the grass and trees around them Joe saw more beautiful wild flowers, and more kinds of wild flowers, than he had ever seen in his life before. It was like riding through a garden, with tremendous red mountain precipices for walls. Beside the trail was the Swift Current River, every now and then widening out into a lovely little green lake, and directly ahead of them, at the head of the cañon, rose an almost perpendicular wall of rock for two thousand feet, to a lofty shelf, on which Swift Current Glacier, snow-covered now, hung like a gigantic white napkin. To the right was the Egyptian pyramid of Mount Wilbur. From the glacier, down over the precipice, were falling half a dozen white streams of waterfalls, like great silver ribbons. As they got nearer and nearer to this head wall, and it seemed to rise higher and higher over them, while the walls on each side of them, the one across the cañon bright red, also grew higher and higher, Joe began to get nervous.
“Say,” he finally asked, “are we going to climb that?”
Mills looked back at him with a grin.
“Sure,” he said.
“Well, I don’t see how,” Joe answered. “I’m no goat.”
Switchback Trail up Swift Current Pass