“Yes, I feel a change in the climate,” the irrepressible Bob answered.
“That’s not such a joke as you think, at that,” Mills said. “The climate is different over here, as you’ll see presently.”
They had still another pass to go over—Lincoln Pass (not a part of the Divide) before they could begin the final descent to Lake McDonald, and from the lake shore they began to climb again, with the green water between them and the tremendous red walls of Jackson, where long, narrow snow-fields clung in the hollows. At the top of Lincoln Pass was a meadow, on the edge of a precipice, a meadow full of snow-fields, wild flowers, and a few stunted, twisted pines, for it was on the very edge of timber-line. Here Mills ordered a halt for lunch.
“Charlie Chaplin sandwiches again, Joe,” he said. “You can make tea if you want to, and can find any wood.”
Joe and Bob and the girls between them managed to scrape together enough dead wood to make a small fire, and the water Joe got from the little brook flowing out from under a snow-field and starting on its long journey to the Pacific Ocean.
After lunch, everybody wanted to sit around for a bit, and enjoy the view of Lake Ellen Wilson and Mount Jackson, and Joe and Lucy got their cameras from their packs, and took pictures of each other on horseback, of the party, of Bob and Alice climbing down over an edge of the cliff beside a waterfall, and finally of a wonderful, twisted pine.
“I love the old trees at timber-line,” Joe said. “They look so sort of—of heroic.”
“Guess they are, all right,” Bob laughed. “I’d feel heroic if I stood up here in winter!”
Almost as soon as they started again, they began to drop down a steep, rocky trail to the Sperry camp, a chalet built up on the slopes to accommodate the people who want to climb over the Divide just behind it to Sperry Glacier; and then to drop, by a wide, good trail, past rushing brooks, into the first real forest Joe had seen. The climate certainly was different over here—he began to feel it. It seemed warmer, and the air wasn’t quite so vividly clear. There was a faint suggestion of haze over the lower blue ranges out to the west. It must be different, he told himself, there must be more rainfall, anyhow, and less severe winter cold, or the trees wouldn’t be so much larger.
Down and down they dropped, through spruces and pines and larches, growing ever taller and larger, till suddenly the trail went into the most wonderful forest Joe had ever seen. It was entirely composed of one kind of tree, tall, straight, ghostly gray trees, with a thin bark that shredded in strips on the smaller trunks; and these trees grew so thickly together that their tops made a solid canopy over the ground below, shutting out all sunlight, so that it was almost twilight deep in the heart of the forest. Not a living thing grew on the forest floor; it was simply a carpet of brownish, tiny needle-like dead leaves, and of dead sticks and fallen tree trunks.