As soon as Mills saw the packhorses appear, however, he gave the signal to proceed, so Joe did not have time to look about much. The trail crossed the meadow, the ground squirrels peeking out of their holes and chattering angrily at the disturbance, and then turned left, and began at once to climb, alongside of the great cliff of Gould Mountain. They climbed beside a roaring brook, and Joe soon realized that they weren’t going up Gould at all, but up the side cañon to the east. They hadn’t gone a mile before this brook was far below them, and they looked across the deep hole it had made to the towering cliffs of Gould. Gould is a part of the Great Divide, and Joe could now see more plainly than ever before the strata of the earth crust—layer on layer of different colored stone, like the layers in a gigantic cake. All down the precipices were coming waterfalls, from the snow-fields above, and Joe and Val reckoned that one fall took a clean jump of twenty-five hundred feet. They could hear the thunder of it, across the cañon, though it was not nearly so loud as you might think, because most of the water turned to mist before it reached the bottom.
Now the trail began to get into the region of switchbacks, and Joe could see the horses of all the party strung out far ahead, and then suddenly doubling on their tracks so Mills would pass almost over his head, and speak to him as he went by. Before long, he saw Mills halt, where the trail went close to a beautiful waterfall, and as he came up, he heard the Ranger telling the party that it was Morning Eagle Falls.
“What a pretty name—it must be Indian, of course?” Miss Elkins said.
“Named for some Blackfeet chief, I suppose,” Mills answered.
“Say, dad, what’s the matter with you?” laughed the Jones boy. “Why don’t you christen it Congressman Peter W. Jones Falls? What’s the use of being in the House of Representatives if you can’t name a dinky little waterfall after yourself?”
“My boy, he’s waiting till he reaches the biggest mountain in the Park, to name that after himself,” the other congressman said, while every one laughed, and the procession started up again.
They were climbing an ever steeper trail, now, and the trees began to grow smaller and smaller, while, looking back, Joe could see Grinnell Meadow far below him and the great cliff of Gould shooting up out of it. Ahead, they began to get into snow-fields, and then they crossed timber-line, where the trees were twisted and bent and even laid over flat by the wind, and sometimes an evergreen a foot thick would be only eighteen inches tall, and then, for twenty feet, bend over and lie along the ground like a vine, sheared by the wind. Beyond timber-line they came into a wild, naked, desolate region of broken shale stone, with tiny Alpine flowers growing in the crannies, snow-fields lying all about, and to their right, quite near, the southern end of Gould Mountain where it dropped down a little to the Continental Divide level, to their left the bare stone pile summit of Mount Siyeh, which is over ten thousand feet high. A few more steps, and they stood on top of the pass, and looked over the rim, on the tumbled mountains to the south, with the great blue and white pyramid of Jackson (ten thousand feet) rising a dozen miles away or more, over what looked like a vast hole in the earth.
“This is Piegan Pass,” said Mills.
“Why Piegan—and why a pass?” one of the congressmen asked. “I thought a pass was a place where you went between things, not up over their backs.”
The Ranger laughed. “You’re only seven thousand feet up here,” he said. “That mountain to the east, Siyeh, is ten thousand.”