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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
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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
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