guard, herded the last of the queue up the saddle. Some
felt the mile and a half they had come was sufficient exertion so lingered on
the saddle to return to camp at leisure. John started up the trail that
contoured the next knoll, passing a few limber pines that thrust out ragged
arms to the wind, their barkless trunks twisting like corkscrews.Up and up climbed the excellent trail at an easy grade toward the snow which the wind had swept off the backbone of the ridge, and piled in drifts on the Death Valley side, burying the upper part of the trail. Deciding that the top of the ridge would be better going than the snow. John Delmonte led the way. It was like walking along the peak of a roof, looking down into the two valleys. No vegetation had ventured this far, only the bare boulders.
A steep snow slope loomed ahead. Joan remembered that the ranger in the station in Wildrose Canyon had told him a survey party on horseback had been turned back only a few days ago because of too much snow. There seemed no way to avoid the drift so he plunged upward ankle-deep breaking a zig-zag trail as he went.
The first of the climbers topped the snow-slope and their "ohs" and "ahs" indicated to those still struggling up the snow, that something satisfying loomed ahead. There, just a few rods ahead stood the tall cairn of rocks which marked the summit.
Reaching the top of a mountain must release some special substance into the bloodstream. The fatigue of hours on the trail is forgotten in the glorious feeling of satisfaction, which comes with having conquered another peak. No wonder the Desert Peakers love to exchange their horizontal world at sea level, in and around Los Angeles, for the vertical world of the mountain tops. Telescope Peak offered them something special in this line. Nowhere else in the United States does the terrain fall so abruptly for such a distance. Its head, for half the year crowned with snow and battered by icy winds, rises in the air at 11,045 feet, while the ridges and gullies plunge to below sea level, there to swelter in the bottom of Death Valley.
In 1861, W. T. Henderson, one of an exploring
party looking for the Lost Gunsight mine, made the first ascent and named the
peak because, "he could see 200 miles in all directions as through a
telescope."But a dozen years before Henderson came this way, another party-the Jayhawkers bound for the California gold fields-also had climbed the Panamints. Their scouts, perhaps, had pulled themselves up to this ridge and had looked with despair toward valleys and mountains yet to be surmounted before they could find an open route to coastal California.
In later days a graphic glimpse of