Vol. III.

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the warm breezes of the summer days there comes a desire for a change of scene, a yearning for that abandon which can only be found in nature's 'more secluded haunts.

What a blessed comfort it is, when this feeling takes hold of one, to shake off the dust and dirt of the city, to leave behind its hot pavements and gloomy walls, and hurry off to some cool, breezy nook, among the mountains beside the many streams and lakes, which like jewels deck our Western slope! Man, after all, is a child of nature. He builds cities and palatial residences and all that, but when he wants peace, rest, rejuvenating he hies himself to the mountains, or the ocean, away from life's foibles and conventionalities, back to its real simplicity.

It is the purpose of this article to describe such an outing last summer at Mount Hood, and give our readers an opportunity to live it over again with us. The trip to Mt. Hood has been so often written about and described from so many different standpoints that it seems impossible to say anything new, and yet each party making the ascent of the mountain has experiences and gets impressions of its grandeur worth relating.

We had talked about and planned for the trip for a whole year and when, on July 10th, 1899, we started, a merrier or more determined party never set out for the land of perpetual snow.

It was "Mt. Hood or bust" with us.

No. 2.

We had our own teams with all necessary equipage, and went leisurely, camping wherever night overtook us, Our route was along the section line road to Gresham by way of Pleasant Home, and on to Sandy postoffice, thence to Revenues on Salmon River, thence to the toll gate, and thence to Government Camp. A mile this side of the toll gate we struck camp by a beautiful stream, and enjoyed some fairly good fishing. From the toll gate on the road is rough and hilly with the hills all one way, leading to higher and higher elevations." The scene is one of grand confusion. Rocks and boulders, huge and ragged, lie strewn over the surface on every hand; deep, yawning ravines lie in the shadow of mountains thousands of feet high, bearing upon their brows trees beaten out of symmetry by the violence of the winds. The forest and vegetation becomes thinner and more scattered, and the trees more scrubby as if the brimstone from cld Hood had withered their energies. Sometimes our eyes rested on a great white scar of broken calcorious rock, on which the moss cannot grow and the lizzards dare not creep. Then we see a cliff beetling far aloft, its crest streaked with snow. The streams, particularly the Zig-Zag and Still Creek, come leaping through the gorges with tremendous velocity, carrying everything before them. As we sat beside the Zig-Zag at our luncheon, we could hear the great boulders chink their heads together as they were being carried down by the waters of that

swift and turbulent stream. The ZigZag and Still creeks parallel each other for several miles, and finally empty into the Sandy River. At several places they come very near together, so much so that at one point one might stand on the ridge between them and cast a fly into either stream. The roaring of their swift waters is almost deafening. The occasional screech of the bluejay or the loud hammering of the woodpecker on some dead tree is all one hears indicative of life in the vast solitude.

After leaving Revenues, Mt. Hood was shut out from our view for a long distance by intervening mountains until we reached a sort of backbone several miles beyond the toll gate, when suddenly the peak the peak stood revealed to us again in all his grandeur, apparently so near that we could see the rifts in the snow on his sides and feel the cool breeze which he seemed to waft us in welcome. The greeting we gave him in return made the welkin ring.

Another surprise equally pleasant occurred as we were toiling up a long hill in the heat of a July day, when some one suddenly exclaimed, "Goodness! whose flower garden is this?" The answer came immediately, "the Lord's." We were in the midst of a perfect garden of large and brilliant flowers, standing from one to ten feet from the ground, in great clusters as far as the eye could reach. They were the farfamed rhododendrons filling the forest with a blaze of glorious color, and a perfume as sweet as that of the heliotrope. Nestling beneath them and scattered here and there we found the celebrated Washingtonian lilies, sometimes called Mt. Hood lilies. We were much interested in the flora of this region and noticed one peculiarity, that as we got nearer the mountain, while the flowers were of different shades and colors and of different arrangement on the stem, they all had the conformation of snapdragons.

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Traveling along in the midst of these exhilarating summer scenes, we soon reminded that old Boreas has something to do with these flower gardens, for much to our consternation we found, for the next two miles, from one

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to ten feet of snow on the road. A change from summer to winter scenes could not have been more sudden or complete. It was necessary to drive Our teams over the snow for this two miles or turn back, and we had no thought of turning back. first attempt to scale one of these snow banks resulted in such a general mix-up of the horses, wagon and driver that it took some time and profanity to extricate them. Fortunately the ladies had gone. on ahead and will probably never know what a blasphemous pair of men were trying to control the destinies of the party. Notwithstanding this excusable lapse, our general course was such as would have pleased the most enthusiastic exhorter, for it was ever upward and onward.

Our subsequent navigation over this stretch of snow was exciting in the extreme, not to say dangerous. The hurricane deck of a spring wagon, with first

one wheel and then another breaking through and going up to the hub in the snow, and first one horse and then the other floundering out of an apparently bottomless pit into which he had dropped, was enough to try the nerve of a veteran stage driver. It can easily be imagined how it would suffice make each particular hair of a novice to stand on end. We shall not soon forget what a satisfied and devout feeling took possession of our inner consciousness as we slid and floundered down off of the last one of those treacherous snow drifts

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and stood once again on solid earth. Our vehicles had stood the ordeal, our horses were still alive, but looked as though they had swum the Willamette River, and as for ourselves, we wondered, after having recovered from threatened. heart-failure, what we would have to encounter next. We were not long in finding out, for we were soon attacked in a most unmerciful manner by an enemy as numerous as the sands of the sea-mountain mosquitoes. Most people have had occasion to feel how affectionate and insinuating those creatures are. They approached first in battalions, then in whole armies and finally by the million. Having heard reports of the meddlesome disposition of these creatures, we had provided ourselves with plenty of mosquito netting, which served, to some extent, as a protection, but they would find their way in even through that. A snap shot of one of our party with about three yards of netting wound around his. head and face would make a fine curio in photographic art, but he declined absolutely to allow it to be reproduced. However, we fought our way through to Government Camp.

Government Camp, it should be stated, is the stopping place for parties intending to make the ascent of Mount Hood, and they usually start from there on their long climb. It is located about four miles from the timber line and eight miles from the summit. One gets a fine view of the mountain from there, and can feel the cool air that is wafted from its everlasting snows. Barring the mosquitoes it is a delightful spot.

We rested here a day and made arrangements for the ascent. Our guide, Mr. O. C. Yocum, who is also the proprietor of Government Camp, busied himself during the day in putting spikes in the soles of our shoes, getting the alpenstocks in readiness, for ours was the first party of the season, and in telling us how easy it was to climb the mountain if we only just made up our minds to do it. He advised us to go as far as the timber line that evening, camp there over night and start at four o'clock the next morning. We decided to do this and set out in the afternoon for the timber line. We placed our

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camping outfit on a sled, hitched horse to it, and one of us led the horse while the others brought up the fear in regular Klondike style. After going about a mile over rocks and bowlders, we reached the snow, and from there on we traveled over snow sometimes a hundred feet in depth, judging from the fact that the tops of large fir trees in places were only just protruding above the surface. At other places the snow reached half way or more up the trunks of the trees. This half-submerged evergreen forest presented a rare scene, to which a Kodak cannot do justice. was impossible to follow the road, for there was a road somewhere beneath us, leading to the timber line, but the guide picked out the way among the trees, chopping off limbs here and there to enable us to get through with the horse and sled. We intended to spend the night at Camp George, named in honor of Judge M. C. George, but found it under fifteen or twenty feet of snow, so we made a detour to the south about a mile where he found a bare place large enough for our tent and. à campfire. Here, surrounded on all sides by oceans of snow, we pitched our camp, made a fire, and prepared to spend the night. We were not far from White River Glacier, but the moraines and the glacier itself were still deep under the snow. We anticipated a beautiful sunset, for even at this point we were far above the surrounding mountains, but a storm had been raging all day to the south and. west of us, its distant thunders making us fearful lest it should reach us and compel us to turn back, but though it passed us by, the dark ominous clouds obscured the setting sun. That evening we took the sled up the mountain side and had a regular toboggan, the bracing winds making it seem like winter instead of the middle of July. About 10 o'clock the clouds disappeared and the stars. came out, seemingly. very near us, and shining with great brilliancy, reminding us of Poe's lines:

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While the stars that oversprinkle, All the heavens seem to twinkle, with a crystaline delight.

An incident now occurred that we