Mills laughed again, but said no more. Instead, he plodded steadily on, till the great cliff wall seemed about to hit them in the face, and Joe could hear the thunder of the white waterfalls as they leaped and plunged down from the melting glacier two thousand feet over his head.
Just as he had decided the Ranger was playing a joke on him, for surely nobody could get up those walls, the trail turned sharp to the right, and began to go up.
Then Joe learned what a Rocky Mountain switchback is.
A switchback trail can be put up almost any slope that is not actually perpendicular, and the slope they were climbing now was not quite that, though to Joe it seemed pretty near it. The trail was about four or five feet wide, and was dug right out of the side of the hill. It went up at an angle of about twenty degrees, for perhaps two hundred feet to the right, then it swung sharp left on a steep hairpin turn and ran another two hundred or three hundred feet, took another sharp hairpin turn, and so on up, and up. When Joe had made one of these turns, he could look right down on the top of the blankets on the packhorse below him.
“Say,” he called up to the Ranger, “what happens to you if your horse falls off here?”
“Your horse never falls off,” Mills answered. “If he did, you’d probably take to harp playing. But he won’t.”
They climbed up these switchbacks for two thousand feet or so, and then worked around a shoulder of the mountain so that they couldn’t see the glacier any more, but looking back down the cañon Joe could see a great, narrow hole, with the green lakes like a string of jewels at the bottom, and at the far end, as blue and level as the ocean, the vast prairie.
“The prairie looks just like the ocean,” he said.
“Does it?” said the Ranger. “I never saw the ocean. Must be fine.”