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grass-browned knoll. The wind roared, and for 12 hours I slept. We had considered starting the climb at four a.m. two hours before daylight, but didn't stir until six. Under the sunless early-morning sky, we again ate stew and milk, and rolled up our packs. We were clad in the customary rock climber's uniform of leather-patched overalls, plaid shirts and high-topped crepe-soled tennis shoes. A debated point among Southern California climbers is whether it is best to carry a sleeping bag up Snow creek or to go light - and cold. Roped to a light pack-frame were my five-pound compactly rolled goose-down sleeping-bag with its balloon-silk cover; my quart canteen; a meager array of edibles stuffed into a little canvas sack; and several little tied-on rolls of parkas, mittens, and like arctic garb. The pack weighed 8 or 10 pounds. George was equipped with a little knapsack and a blanket. We climbed over the barbed-wire fence at seven o'clock and started up through brush and rocks. It was fun to be pioneering our own way, without anyone along who had been there before. We moved quietly, usually a little distance apart, talking but little, in low tones, each minding his own business and enjoying himself in his own way. Each might have been alone. Thus one can enjoy the mountains best. Throughout the day, the refrain of a yodelling song kept running through my head, something about "And I climbed so high . . . till I reached the sky... Through the cold still early-morning air we picked our way. The lower part of the canyon was choked with yellowing trees, and we climbed up a brushy, rocky ridge to the left, a flattish mesa on top, along which ran a little path that goes we knew not where. We trudged along it, across the plateau covered with ripe grass, mesquite and red rocks. After an hour or two, the path turned sharply to the left. We deserted it to clamber down the rocky canyon-side to the bed of Snow creek. Then the real climb began. With the path, we left every man-made mark and were alone with the mountain. We found ourselves in one of those rare blessed places, in these days of roads, good trails and C. C. C. improvements, where not a single scrap of gum paper or cigarette stub or sardine can reduces mountains to the petty messiness of man. Our muscles were now limber and light, freed of the fatigue which leadens them the first few hours of a climb. None of the way was difficult so far as technical rock climbing goes. We went unroped. It was, in the main, what is popularly known as a "grind." The gorge of the creek was heaped and jammed with boulders. The canyon walls towered over us as they bounded upward |
in slabby granite to
brush-grown, tangled, rock-strewn, rugged mountain country along the ridges.
The mountain about us was vast. We were unimportant specks moving among huge
boulders in the bottom of the chasm. As we climbed we paused occasionally to catch our breath, and to pore professionally over the quadrangle map whose contour lines were alarmingly close together in our locality, but which told nothing that wasn't laid out before our |
eyes in immense detail. In what
looked on the map like five miles horizontally. the creek rose nearly two miles
in elevation. Steadily, with a distance-eating rhythm, we climbed over huge
boulders and coarse talus. The crepe soles of our tennis shoes clung
remarkably, by friction, to the water-polished gradients of good gray
granite. The creek bed went up, and up, and up. Interminably we took step after step, great steps and small steps, like climb- |
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