San Franciso Mountains, AZ down the mountainside to the plateau below. Butterflies were busy among the blue lupines and rock squirrels frisked about collecting groceries for a long, hard winter. As I parked the car a cool mountain-scented breeze stirred the aspen leaves in an excited whisper. I took a deep breath, shouldered my thirty pound pack, and faced the barren summit of Agassiz peak looming three thousand feet above.
It was a pleasant walk up the sloping sunny meadow in the fresh morning air. But near its head I cut up through a somber spruce forest to the west ridge of Agassiz Peak. It was hear I began to realize this was going to be a long, tough pull and I went into low gear, plodding slowly up the ever-steepening ridge.
After an hr I stopped in an opening at about 10,500 feet to rest and enjoy the tremendous view westward of the plateau below. Sudden I heard a loud scratching sound behind me. I looked around and saw what I first thought was a porcupine high in a dead spruce. But it wasn't. It was a bear's head peaking at me around a tree trunk. The bear had a startled expression and I expect I did too. We looked at each other a few minutes. Then the bear decided to leave and he slid down the tree with the speed of a fireman man on a brass pole, chunks of dead bark flying in all directions. At the bottom he took to the woods and lumbered off at top speed, grunting like an enormous pig. He was a big fellow with a light Cinnamon coat, weighing maybe 350 pounds, and as I plodded along upwards I was just as pleased that he had voted to leave this part of the mountain to me.
But I hadn't gone a quarter of a mile when I was brought up sharply by a sound like a baby crying. I cautiously moved forward and soon spotted a little bear cub far up in a spiny alpine fir. He was wailing piteously in a voice so human it was startling. Below stood Momma Bear looking up and giving encouraging grunts. Neither of them saw me, but apparently Papa had warned his family that a dread human was in the offing and to get going. Having heard at my mother's knee and everywhere that it is wisest to let mama bears and their cubs transact the business of living undisturbed, I stayed perfectly quiet. Little by little the cub made his perilous descent crying all the while, until he finally reached the ground and hastily followed mama into the heavy spruce thickets. It looked as if my sojourn on the San Francisco would be far from lonely.
At 11,000 feet the heavy spruce-fir-forests began to thin, the trees became stunted, and five hundred feet higher the final treeless, chocolate-brown cone of Agassiz Peak rose into the deep blue sky. To mountain enthusiasts timberline is an exhilarating no-mans -land between the familiar world of vegetation below and the fascinating and mysterious arctic realm of rock, snow and ice of the high peaks. My spirits rose as I slowly tracked past the last wind-blown spruces, some of them bent almost flat among the bare lava blocks.
But the regions above timberline are by no means as desolate as they first seem, and I came upon many diminutive gardens of bright alpine flowers, grasses and ferns in the lee of sheltering rocks. They grew only four to six inches high and the largest covered a few square feet, but they were as lush and verdant as if they were daily cared-for and irrigated. Among the flowers, I was particularly surprised to find the light-blue, cup-like clustered blossoms of the sticky Polemonium, or Sky Pilot. This is a far-distant southern outpost for this hardy inhabitant of the high Rockies.
At last the grade slacked off and a few easy steps
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it's summit snows often appearing to float in the sky like a silver cloud.
It was inevitable. I had to go.
So I started from Flagstaff one early morning in July and drove the winding road which climbs through pine, fir and aspen forests to the Arizona Snow Bowl, winter sports center, 9,300 feet up on the western flank of the peaks. Now it was a long, green, aspen-fringed meadow slanting
 
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