“Some speech!” Spider whispered.
It was now Spider’s turn.
“Everything Bennie said goes for me,” he began, “except this knock on the climate. It was raining when we left Portland, but Dr. Warren told us it would be clear when we got to Salem, and here’s the old sun coming out now. I want to say the Salem climate’s all right—like the Salem scouts. And Bennie forgot something, too. He’s always forgetting things. Once he forgot it was vacation, and tried to get into the schoolhouse. Now he’s forgotten to say to you fellows that when any of you come East, you just show up in Southmead, where we live, and we’ll try to be half as decent to you as you’ve been to us. And we hope you’ll all come.”
Loud cheers greeted this speech, and Bennie applauded harder than anybody.
“That last part goes, you bet,” he shouted. “I didn’t really forget it, though. I just got rattled.”
The meeting broke up with a scout cheer, and the boys heard the shouts and good-byes even after the cars had started down the road.
“Some swell feed!” said Bennie. “Pretty nice of ’em, eh, Spider? I guess they must like you pretty well, Uncle Bill, or they wouldn’t have done this for us.”
“I ran into them in their camp last summer, and got to know ’em,” the doctor answered. “Well, how do you like being an after-dinner orator?”
Bennie looked sober. “Tell you one thing,” he replied. “Next year in school I’m going in for debating, the way Spider does. I’m not going to feel such a boob on my feet again. Gee, I was scared pink.”
“I won’t let you forget that, Bennie,” said Spider. “We’ll make a Demosthenes of you yet.”
The cars were now racing southward up the Willamette valley, and traveling on the fine Pacific Highway, which stretches all the way from Portland to the California boundary.
“I want to make Eugene tonight,” said Uncle Billy. “That’s why I’m stepping on her. Eugene is the town where the State University is—the college that Harvard came west to play football with a few years ago. We’ll find a good camp site just south of Eugene, and spend the night there. Tomorrow we’ll push on as far as we can toward Medford.”
“When do we get to Crater Lake?” the boys asked.
“Well, I doubt if we make Medford tomorrow. It’ll take another day. Then we’ll stock up with provisions, and try to make the lake the next day, which will be the Fourth of July. That’s the day the Park is due to open.”
“Can we get some firecrackers in Medford?”
“Sure!” the doctor laughed.
The valley grew narrower as they ran on southward, and the hills on either side seemed higher. But still the boys saw no mountains, and none of the great forest trees they’d heard about in Oregon. They reached Eugene late in the day—a lively little town, with the big, handsome buildings of the University dominating it. Still they saw no mountains.
“Well, I suppose there are some, but you got to show me,” Bennie declared.
Beyond the town, they ran the cars up a side road to a patch of woods by a stream, and hurried to make camp and get supper before it was dark.
“Let’s see how good scouts you really are,” Mr. Stone said to the boys. “One of you set up the stove and make a fire, and two of you get up the tents and blow up the sleeping bags. Uncle Bill and I will get the grub ready.”
Dumplin’ took the stove as his job, because he knew how it worked. As soon as it was set up, he hustled around for dead wood. Meanwhile Bennie and Spider strung the ropes between trees for the tents, cut pegs, and got the tents up. Then they tackled the sleeping bags. It was warm that evening, and before they had gone far they were hot.
“Say, how much air do these things hold?” Bennie called. “I been pumping an hour.”
“Well, sleep on it flat if you’re tired. But I want mine blown up,” his uncle answered.
At last they had all five bags blown up and laid in the tents. By this time the fire was roaring in the stove, and Dumplin’ had a neat little wood-pile beside it, the two men had set up a folding table and chairs, and food and coffee were cooking on the stove. Pretty soon Mr. Stone called out, “Come and get it!” and with a lantern hanging from a limb over the table, they all sat down.
“Well, this sure beats a hotel!” said Uncle Bill.
“Beats a couple of hotels,” said Dumplin’, wiping his perspiring forehead. “You don’t have to wear a coat here.”
“Wait till you get to the lake, and you’ll be hollering for a coat,” his father smiled.
After supper, the boys drew lots to see who would wash the dishes. Bennie lost, and the rest built a little camp fire between the two tents while he was clearing up. They lay around the fire talking for an hour, and then Uncle Billy ordered “Bed!”
“Early start tomorrow,” he said. “Everybody out at five.”
The boys undressed and crawled into their sleeping bags. Then they bounced up and down to feel how comfortable they were.
“Mine’s too hard,” said Bennie.
“So’s mine,” said Spider.
“You’ve got so much air in mine I’ll have a blowout,” said Uncle Billy.
“Gee, think of all that work for nothing!” Bennie groaned.
If anybody had been outside the tent, he would have heard three little hisses as they let some air out of their beds. Then, three minutes later, he would have heard three people breathing in sound slumber.
The next day, sure enough Uncle Billy routed everybody out at five o’clock. They had pancakes and syrup, and bacon and coffee and toast for breakfast, and then camp had to be struck and the cars packed again. The sleeping bags had to be deflated and rolled up by the three boys, and put in their canvas cases. The tents had to be rolled up and also put in cases. The dunnage bags had to be repacked, the dishes washed and put into the boxes on Uncle Billy’s car. It was long after seven before they got away.
On this day, at last, they began to get a taste of wild Oregon—but just a taste, the doctor told them. They finally came to the head of the Willamette valley, and climbed up a long grade, beside a wild, tumbling stream, amid huge old fir trees, and then down a long, wooded cañon on the farther side. They rolled through more valleys full of fruit orchards, and they passed through several towns. In one of them, where they stopped to get an ice cream soda—or rather ice cream sodas, for both the scouts had two apiece and Dumplin’ had three—a big banner was stretched across the street, with the words on it in letters two feet high:
IT’S THE CLIMATE.
“Golly, you wouldn’t think they had any climate anywhere else,” said Bennie. “Out here, you’ve only got one kind. In little old Massachusetts we have every kind.”
“Sure, and on the same day, too,” Uncle Billy laughed.
All that afternoon they climbed up endless grades, where the highway was cut out of the sides of the cañons, and the great trees shadowed the road, and down again, and up again.
“Are we in the Cascade Mountains now?” the boys asked.
“No, these are just hills,” said the doctor. “You won’t see any mountains till we get almost into Medford. Cheer up, they’ll be there tomorrow.”
The grades were so numerous, and so long and hard, that it was impossible to make as many miles in a day here as it is in the East. As the sun began to sink, the doctor began watching for camp sites, and presently he pulled into a field beside the road where a brook came down from a hill, and they camped for a second night on the road.
An early start again was ordered, and now the grades grew less severe again, and after a few hours the cars ran out into a wide plain, and suddenly the boys gave a yell.
“The mountains!” they cried.
Sure enough, there they were. To the east lay the blue rampart of the Cascade range, and right in the centre, covered white with snow, shot up the peaked pyramid of Mount McLaughlin. To the south and west, shutting the valley in, rose more mountains, some of them still showing snow on their summits. Across the head of the valley ran a tumbling green stream, the Rogue River.
“That river comes down from close to Crater Lake,” said Uncle Billy.
“Gee, I’d like to get into it right now,” Bennie remarked.
A dozen miles more, and they were in Medford, a neat, clean little city (it would be called a town in the East), surrounded by flourishing fruit orchards and grain fields. The boys scouted around for some crackers and fireworks, while the men restocked the cars with provisions, got gas and oil, and inquired about the road to the lake.
“Well,” said the doctor, as they met at the cars again, “we don’t get to Crater Lake tomorrow.”
“Aw, gee, why not?” Bennie demanded.
“Road’s not open yet to the rim. Can’t get much beyond Government Camp.”
“What’s the trouble—snow?” asked Mr. Stone.
The doctor nodded.
“Snow!” said Spider, wiping his hot forehead. “Don’t sound possible.”
“It’s the climate,” said Bennie.
Everybody laughed, and Dumplin’ announced he was going to get another ice cream soda while the leaders decided what to do.
When he came back, the doctor and Mr. Stone had decided to go back up the road and then up the Rogue River for a few miles, on the way to Crater Lake, and camp there over the Fourth and the day following. By the third day it was probable, the doctor said, that the government rangers would have the snow blasted out of the road.
“Blasted out?” said Spider.
“Sure; they use TNT. It would take forever to shovel those drifts.”
“Oh, let’s go up and watch ’em!” Bennie pleaded.
“And get the cars mired? No, thank you! We’ll camp by the Rogue River and wait. You can swim and Spider can study birds, and Dumplin’ can wish he was nearer a soda fountain. Come on.”
They turned off the highway at the Rogue River bridge, and the minute they were off the macadam the dust began to fly. Spider looked back into the cloud.
“Glad I’m not in the Stones’ car,” he said. “What makes it so dusty?”
“This soil is all volcanic ash or pumice,” said the doctor, “and it hasn’t rained here, probably, for a month, and won’t for five or six more.”
“It’s the climate,” chuckled Bennie.
Two or three miles up this dusty road, and close to a small, dilapidated looking house, made of boards and huge, hand-hewn shingles or “shakes,” the doctor put the car off the road and into a field which was baked as hard as a brick, with the grass dried up and brown. At the edge of this field was a grove of trees with shiny copper-colored bark and glossy green leaves, called laurel trees, and beyond them the bank plunged sharp down for fifty feet to the rushing green river.
“Camp,” said Uncle Billy, stopping the car. “Here’s where we live for two days at least.”
As soon as camp was made, and wood cut, the entire party ran down the bank to a gravelly beach by the river’s edge, stripped, and plunged into the water. Five yells immediately rose in the stillness, and five bodies came splashing back to shore.
“That water comes down from the snow-fields, all right,” said Mr. Stone.
“That’s why it’s so green,” said the doctor.
“And why Dumplin’s so pink,” laughed Bennie, pointing at Lester, who certainly looked like a very plump boiled lobster.
That night they sang and joked around the camp fire till nine o’clock, because there was no early start in the morning. When Bennie woke up, however, he saw that Spider’s bed was empty. Going down to the river in his pyjamas, for a plunge, he found Spider, all dressed, with a note-book in his hand, watching birds.
“Gee, this is a great place to see birds,” Spider called. “I’ve got nine kinds already, most of ’em that I never saw before. And you want to watch for the funny little lizards on the ground.”
Bennie almost immediately heard a rustle in the dead leaves beside him, and looking down saw a small lizard-like creature scurry up on to a flat stone. He reached down to pick it up—and the lizard wasn’t there! He was on a stone two feet away.
“Say!” he called, “this is the quickest thing I ever saw. Beats a weasel.”
“Mr. Stone says they call ’em swifts,” Spider answered.
Among the new birds that Spider saw, and added to his bird list, he later learned from Mr. Stone and the doctor, were ravens, western tanagers (a beautiful, bright yellow bird), valley quail, camp robbers, water ousels, which live always by the water and build their nests behind the waterfalls, the western catbird, which is much like the eastern, only brownish, and blue jays of a much darker color than in the East. These jays fought and squawked around the camp all day long. Then there were crows and other birds he already knew.
“Well, never mind your old birds now,” Bennie said after breakfast. “This is the Glorious Fourth. Let’s fire off some crackers and do something to celebrate.”
“We might run down to Medford and see the parade,” the doctor suggested.
This was hailed with delight, so they unpacked the cars, and started off for the day. Medford was full of people. There was a parade and a ball game and a lively time generally.
“Well, this is what I call wild life in Oregon,” Bennie laughed. “We came 4,000 miles to get into the wilderness, and here we are with about ten thousand other people watching a parade in a city. Some wilderness!”
“You wait,” his uncle cautioned. “In about a week, you’ll have so much wilderness you’ll be crying for home and mother.”
That night, back in camp, they set off their own fireworks, shooting the rockets from an improvised chute out over the water, and the next day they spent in exploring two or three old gold diggings they found by the bank—shafts which some prospector had laboriously dug far into the earth, but without getting much gold, apparently, for the diggings had all been abandoned. Bennie and Spider spent two or three hours searching everywhere for nuggets, but they found nothing. It was hot and sultry, too, and everybody was getting impatient.
“I’m going to start tomorrow for the lake,” the doctor said that night. “We’ll camp below the rim if we can’t get up. It’s too hot here.”
“It’s the climate,” said Bennie—and the doctor and Dumplin’ fell upon him and rolled him on the hard ground till he howled for mercy.
Everybody was out at 4:30 the next morning. The hot weather still held. In fact, it was hotter than the day before. Bennie waited till he was on the extreme edge of camp, with a clear field to run in, and then remarked, “It’s the climate.”
But everybody was too busy packing to chase him.
At seven o’clock the cars were ready, and the start was at last made on the last lap for Crater Lake.
“It’s only eighty miles—even a bit less from here, I guess. But it’s up-hill all the way, and of course we don’t know what kind of roads we’re going to get into.”
For many miles they ran along past scattered ranches where the irrigation ditches paralleled the road, and the alfalfa scented the air. Then the country began to get rougher, the road began to climb, the tumbling, foaming green river dropped farther and farther below them into a wild ravine, while they climbed along the side.
“This is something like!” Bennie shouted. “Bring on some more of your old wilderness!”
“You’ll get some more pretty soon now.”
They passed a little settlement, where both cars stopped for gas and to let the engines cool, and then the road ran into a forest, and traveled straight as an arrow, making a long aisle as far as the eye could see.
“Government forest,” the doctor said. “This is a government road. Well, boys, what do you think of these trees?”
The boys looked on either side of the dusty white road, into stands of Douglas fir that almost took their breath away—great giants six and eight feet through, and rising without any branches for a hundred feet or more, straight as masts, and after the first branches going on up another fifty or a hundred feet.
“Some shrubs,” said Bennie.
“You’ll see a lot of bigger ones before we get back to Portland,” said the doctor.
After running for ten miles or so through the forest, while the car and their faces became covered with the white pumice dust, they came suddenly on a beautiful, cold little stream, and beside this stream an open camp ground, maintained by the government for anybody who wanted to use it. Here they stopped for early lunch, under the cool shadows of the great trees.
There were at least a dozen other cars there, and half as many tents were pitched in the woods. Fires were going. Some campers had wash hung out to dry. The camp was clean and well cared for.
“Well,” said Spider, looking around, “all I can say is that Massachusetts has got something to learn from Oregon. If you tried to camp anywhere at home, you’d get chased off. And when the State does get any land for a forest, it doesn’t make any provisions for camping. They won’t let you build a fire. Can’t camp without a fire.”
“Here’s something for you scouts to think about,” Mr. Stone said. “Why don’t you talk up State forests and camp sites when you go home? The Boy Scouts could do a lot if they all got together.”
“You bet we’ll think about it,” Spider said. “Why, there’s a State reservation right near Southmead, and a nice park on it, and the State hasn’t even made a path around the pond so you can get to the water.”
“People in the East haven’t learned how to camp yet, anyway,” the doctor said. “They think they’ve got to have a hotel every fifty miles.”
“Sure,” said Bennie. “Ma’s idea of roughing it is to have hot and cold water and steam heat.”
After lunch they pushed on, and soon began to climb again, up and up, while the radiators boiled in the heat, till they came to the entrance of the Crater Lake National Park, where they stopped to pay the tolls on the cars, and have a tag pasted on the wind-shield. While this was being done, the boys crossed the road and looked down into a tremendous gorge cut by Castle Creek into the lava rock. It was their first real taste of what was ahead. Soon after this, as the road kept on climbing, they began to get glimpses through the trees of mountain tops, covered with snow, and before long the road began to get muddy in places, as if the snow had but recently melted from it.
At last they reached Government Camp, where the Park superintendent and the rangers live, at the foot of the last slope to the rim. Here there were great patches of snow all about in the woods, and trickles of water beside the road.
“Can we get up to the rim?” the doctor called to someone in a doorway.
“Half a dozen cars have gone up, and haven’t come back,” a voice answered.
“Maybe they can’t get back,” the doctor laughed.
“Maybe,” said the other man. “But I reckon they got through. Better put on your chains, though.”
After the chains were put on both cars, they started out once more, on the last pull to the lake.
“Only three or four miles now,” said Uncle Billy, “and a thousand feet to climb.”
The road was muddy, but well graded, as it wound up the ravine, through heavy timber, with great drifts of snow on either side. Before long they came to places where the drifts had been shoveled out to let the road through, and in these places the road was so soft that everybody but the drivers got out and walked. The boys made snowballs and pelted each other. Once or twice the cars stuck, and they had to get boughs to put under the wheels. But there was no serious delay till they were almost at the top of the climb. Here they found several cars stalled ahead of them. Going forward, they found that one big drift was still in the way. Part of it was cut through, but the last end was still ten feet of solid snow. The rangers were even now laying a train of TNT through it, and connecting the fuses. The boys rushed back for their cameras.
When the dozen charges were ready, everybody ran out of the way. A ranger connected the wires, and went back behind a tree to the battery. A moment later there was a terrific explosion, and a huge geyser of black smoke and black water rose from the drift, the blackened water settling down in a fine, dirty mist on the snow to leeward.
“Gosh, I hope I snapped that at the right time!” said Bennie. “Made me jump so, I couldn’t tell.”
Mr. Stone, who was working with a graflex, said he thought he got a good one, anyway. Then they went forward and found the twelve charges had blasted out a deep ditch in the snow right through the drift. Men sprang in with shovels, and in fifteen minutes the cars could plough through. From there on the snow was melted from the road, and flowers were already coming up through the soft brown pumice soil.
Right ahead of them the boys saw the hotel, and in front of the hotel the land seemed to disappear. It didn’t look at all like a mountain here. The road was now quite level, and there were woods all about. Only to the right there was a mountain peak, close by, covered with a great cap of snow. It looked more as if they were coming to the edge of some cañon.
“Where’s the lake?” they demanded.
“Can you stand it for two minutes more?” the doctor asked.
Now the car was close to the hotel. The boys jumped out and ran ahead, up a little grade. And then they stopped stone dead, and drew in a long breath of astonishment.
Right under their feet the land fell away at so sharp an angle that it was practically a precipice, for more than a thousand feet. This great precipice stretched out to right and left, rising here and there into crags and cliffs a thousand feet above them, and swung around in a vast circle six miles in diameter, thus making what looked like a gigantic hole in the earth. At the bottom of this hole lay the lake; but it was not an ordinary lake. It was not just water. In fact, it didn’t look like water. It was a wonderful, a vivid, an unbelievable blue. It was bluer than the sky.
“It’s the bluest thing I ever saw!” cried Bennie. “Wow! how do you get down to it?”
“There’s just one trail down here,” his uncle answered, “and one around on the east side. Those are the only two ways down to the water.”
“And what’s that little peaked island out there?” Spider asked, pointing to what looked like a pile of cinders at one side of the lake, cinders covered with green weeds.
“That’s Wizard Island. After this old volcano collapsed into the crater, and before it filled with water, she started up again to build a new volcano. That island is the result. It’s a little volcano all by itself, with a crater in the top. That island is 800 feet above the water line, and the green you see on it is made by big trees.”
“Gosh!” said Bennie. “It looks about eight feet high, instead of 800. Can we get to it?”
“We’ll get to it, all right. But we’ve got to make camp before we do anything.”
Crater Lake—Wizard Island, and over it Llao Rock
“Will you tell us after supper all about this lake, how it got made and everything?” Spider asked. “Gee, I wish I’d studied geology.”
“You’ve come to the right place to begin,” said the doctor. “But now for a camp site. Come on with me.”
Leaving the cars, they walked westward along the rim, looking for a chance to get the cars through the drifts. They could manage, they found, to run them a few hundred feet west of the hotel, along what looked like a road. There was a considerable open space between the edge of the rim and the timber, however, and to get back from the rim to the trees they had to get the camp spades out of the cars and dig a ditch through two feet of snow. At last the cars were through, and a comparatively dry spot found under some big fir trees. Here the tents were put up, with the stove between them, the cars unpacked, the beds inflated, and Dumplin’ and Bennie went after wood while Spider took the pails and went back over the snow toward the hotel for water. All the water has to be pumped up to the hotel and the camp grounds from a spring back down the road. When he returned, he reported that already a dozen more cars had arrived, several tents were going up, and there were a lot of people at the hotel.
Meanwhile Bennie and Dumplin’ had discovered that past campers had cleaned out so much of the dead wood that it was hard to find enough for a fire, especially as the woods were still full of snow and the fallen branches buried or else soaking wet. However, they rustled up enough for that night and breakfast, and preparations for supper began.
As the sun got lower and lower, the water of the lake seemed to turn a darker and darker blue, and the snow cap on Garfield, the peak just to the east, turned a lovely rose red—and Bennie put on his coat.
“What you putting that on for?” his uncle asked.
“It’s the climate,” said Bennie, with a grin.
“Well, suppose you and Dump go drain the radiators before we forget it,” the doctor laughed.
“What do you mean, drain the radiators? Are you kidding?” the boys demanded.
“Kidding? Not on your life. Go do as I tell you.”
“But, gee whiz, they were boiling about three hours ago,” Dumplin’ said.
“That was three hours ago, and 2,000 feet lower. Go do as I tell you.”
“Some climate, I’ll say!” Bennie laughed. But he was still skeptical, it was plain to see. He thought his uncle was trying to play a joke on him. However, he and Dumplin’ drained the cars.
A few minutes later they heard the welcome call from the camp, “Come and get it!”
It was still twilight when dinner was over, and the doctor said, “First class in geology will now be held on Victory Rock. Do you scouts have merit badges in geology, by the way?”
“No,” said Spider.
“That’s funny. Seems to me you ought to,” Mr. Stone declared. “Scouts are hiking around the country all the time, and it’s a mighty good chance to see how the earth was made.”
Victory Rock, the boys found, is a kind of bowsprit of lava thrust out from the rim, so that when you stand on it you can see almost all the circle of the lake, and the water appears to be directly under you.
“Now, take a good look,” Uncle Billy said, “and then try to imagine what this place was like before the big explosion. The rim here is 7,000 feet above sea level. In other words, we’ve climbed up, to get here, about half the height of the original mountain. We are about at snow line.”
“About!” Bennie laughed. “About is good!”
“Now just imagine the line of ascent we took from Government Camp carried right on up, all around the lake. When the slopes met, over the middle, in the peak of the original mountain, geologists reckon that peak was from 14,000 to 15,000 feet high. This was one of the highest mountains, if not the highest, in the United States proper. It was an active volcano, of course. If you’ll look over there to the northwest, you’ll see a big, steep precipice with a rounded top. That’s called Llao Rock. Do you see how the bottom of it curves up at either end? Well, that curve shows you where the bottom of a ravine was on the original mountain. In some eruption, ages ago, a great stream of lava flowed down that ravine, filled it up to overflowing, and hardened into rock. If you travel around the lake, you can pick out where each ravine was by the laval cliffs.”
“How high is that Llao Rock?” asked Spider.
“About 2,000 feet from the water.”
“Gee, then that lava stream was more’n a thousand feet deep!”
“It was,” said the doctor. “Much more.”
“And then what happened?” Bennie asked.
“Well, I wasn’t here at the time,” said Uncle Billy, “but as near as the scientists can figure it out, there must have been a tremendous eruption, scattering pumice all over Oregon and making a lot of our rich soil, and then, at the level where we are now, probably a lot of vent holes blew out, making the whole top of the mountain, which was only a shell around the great crater hole, so insecure that it just toppled inward of its own weight. About seven or eight thousand feet of the mountain just collapsed into the crater.”
“Say, I’d like to have been here with the old kodak!” Bennie cried. “And then what happened?”
“Well, then the bottom of the crater evidently started to spit again, and build up a new mountain. It built up a perfect cone, just the shape of the old mountain, almost to the level of the rim. That’s Wizard Island out there. Wizard Island is a later kind of lava and volcanic stuff than what you find in the rim walls. But the old mountain got tired about then, and decided to call it a day, and it’s been resting ever since.”
“But how did the water get here?” Dumplin’ asked.
“Out of the sky. There are no springs, so far as anybody knows, in the crater. That water has just come from the snow and rain—mostly snow, which has been falling into the hole for untold ages. Over on the east side of the lake, it is 2,000 feet deep.”
“Say, you could almost dive there without hitting your head on bottom, couldn’t you?” Bennie laughed. “What makes it so blue?”
“Nobody seems to know that. Some people think there must be some chemical or mineral gets into it. Anyway, there’s no other lake in the world which has its color.”
“I’ll bet there isn’t!” Spider declared. “My, it’s a beautiful thing. When are we going down to it? Are there boats on it? How do they get the boats down there?”
“One at a time!” Mr. Stone laughed. “We’ll go down as soon as the trail is opened. They get the boats down the trail on wheels, by man power, and keep ’em winters over on Wizard Island. You could see the boat-house if it wasn’t so dark.”
“Let’s go over to the hotel and find out if the trail is open yet!” the boys cried, and led the way without waiting for an answer.
No, the trail wasn’t open, the hotel manager told them. But the boatmen had been down and got some rowboats out, and two men had gone down fishing that afternoon.
“But it’s not a safe trip,” the manager added. “We don’t advise anybody to try it. The government is going to begin shoveling the snow out of the trail tomorrow morning. You’d better wait a day or two.”
They thanked him, bought some souvenir post-cards to send home, and went back to camp.
“Have we got to wait?” the boys demanded.
The two men only smiled.
“Better be up early,” they said. “We might have a try at it. Can’t tell. Bennie seems to want a bit of real wild stuff. Maybe we can give it to him.”
There was not wood enough in camp to make a camp fire, and no chance to get any more till daylight. Everybody had put on his sweater, and the air was getting colder and colder.
“Nothing for it but to go to bed,” Mr. Stone declared. “And be thankful you have those blankets you didn’t need at Rogue River.”
“It’s the climate!” said Bennie, as he shivered in his pyjamas and wriggled hastily in between all the blankets he could stuff into his sleeping bag. “Oh, you blankets!”
“And down in Medford, eighty miles away, they’re probably kicking off the sheets,” laughed Uncle Billy. “What do you think of Crater Lake now, eh?”
But Bennie only grunted. He was already half asleep.
The two scouts were first awake the next morning. They took no more time getting dressed than the law allowed, for it was shivery cold, and then went outside the tent to wash. The sun was just coming up, and the night mists still hung around the sides of the rim and over the water of the lake, which was so still that it was exactly like a huge bright blue mirror, six miles wide, in which everything hung upside down. The water in the pails at the side of the tent had a skim of ice over it!
Bennie broke the ice and poured some water in a basin, dousing it on his face and spluttering with the cold. They went over the snow-drifts to the tap to get more water, and the snow was crusted and held them up so that their hobnailed boots crunched and squeaked on it.
“And this is July 7th!” said Spider. “Well, you thought your uncle was joshing about the radiator last night, didn’t you?”
“I sure did,” Bennie answered. “Didn’t realize what a difference altitude makes.”
Campers at the Rim of Crater Lake. Mid-July Snow in Foreground
After they had brought the water, and made a fire in the stove, the scouts went off after a wood supply, while the rest were dressing. They wandered a long way back down the slope, through the forest, and tried to imagine, as they looked back, that instead of being cut off at the rim the mountain went on up another 8,000 feet.
“I guess if it did, we’d be on a glacier here, instead of just snow,” said Spider. “Look, Bennie, at those flowers coming up within a foot of this drift! I’m going to collect a lot of flowers on this trip, and get a merit badge in botany, too. Why don’t you get after some merit badges?”
“Aw, gee, what good am I at botany and stuff like that?”
“Well, you could go after one in forestry. We’ll be seeing a lot of real forests. And there’s hiking, and camping. Oh, lots of ’em.”
“Got your manual with you?”
“Sure.”
“Well, let’s look ’em up later, and see what chance a dub like me has,” Bennie answered. “But this ain’t getting us much fire wood.”
They were so far from the camp ground now that dead wood was plentiful, and they returned to camp over the drifts and the bare clearings where the wild flowers were just sprouting—spring in July—dragging dead limbs enough to last two or three days. The smell of coffee and bacon greeted them as they came up the last slope to the camp.
“By the way,” Spider asked at breakfast, “what was the name of this mountain before it fell into itself?”
“Who was there to name it, you poor fish?” laughed Bennie.
“I never thought of that!”
“It has a posthumous name, though,” said Mr. Stone.
“Come again—come again!” Bennie said. “What kind of a name?”
“Ho, I know what that means!” put in Dumplin’, his mouth full of wheat cakes.
“What what means?” the rest demanded.
“P-p”—he swallowed hard, and then got it out—“posthumous.”
“Well, what does it mean?”
“It means something that comes after you’re dead. If a man writes a book that ain’t printed till he’s dead, it’s a posthumous book.”
“My son,” said Mr. Stone, “I am proud of you.”
“Not to say surprised at him,” the doctor laughed.
Dumplin’ grinned triumphantly, and reached out for more cakes.
“Well, what was its p-p-posthumous name?” Bennie demanded.
“They call the mountain Mount Mazama. You see, there’s a famous club of mountaineers in Portland, who are called the Mazamas, and that’s why the name was given to this vanished peak.”
“Mazama—sounds sort of Indian.”
“It is—it’s the Indian word for a mountain goat.”
“That’s us,” said Bennie. “When do we leap lightly down the rim to the water?”
“As soon as you’ve washed the dishes,” said his uncle.
The sun was well up when they started, and the chill had gone from the air. You could hardly believe water had frozen two hours before. Mr. Stone carried his movie camera, which weighed fifty pounds, on his back in a knapsack made for it, Dumplin’ carried the tripod, also in a sack, Bennie and Spider carried their canteens filled with spring water, their cameras, and the lunch in knapsacks. The doctor had two canteens and the coil of 125 feet of soft alpine braided rope. Everybody had an alpenstock. As the little procession passed the hotel, the people there looked at them curiously.
“You evidently mean business,” somebody said.
“We’re going down to the lake,” said the doctor.
“I wouldn’t try it, if I were you,” the other man replied. “Two chaps went down yesterday, and they had a pretty bad time. They say it’s extremely dangerous.”
“We’ll take a chance,” said Uncle Billy.
The trail starts down just east of the hotel. It is a wide footpath cut in the soft lava and the powdery pumice and conglomerate of the slope, switchbacking down a sharp ravine. But this ravine was now almost filled with snow, so that the path was buried, and the descent had to be made over the bare snow slope, at an angle of fifty degrees. If you once started slipping, there was nothing to stop you for a thousand feet. The park gang of a dozen men or more, with shovels, were just attacking the snow at the top, shoveling out the path and tossing the snow chunks on to the slope, down which they slid and bounded like a bombardment.
The doctor led the way past the shovelers, so they would be out of the range of the falling lumps, uncoiled the rope, tied one end around his waist, flung the other end down the slope, drove his alpenstock deep and firm, braced his feet, and said:
“Now, you all go down to the end, one at a time. Keep a firm hold on the rope. Don’t ever let go with more than one hand. When you get to the bottom, brace your stocks, and Stone, you take up the slack on me as I come down.”
One by one the boys and Mr. Stone faced half sideways to the slope, kept hold of the rope with the right hand, and went down the 125 feet step by step. As Bennie started down, he saw that just above them on the rim were a dozen people, come from the hotel to watch.
“Gee, this is the life!” he shouted.
The boys watched Uncle Billy come down when everybody else was at the rope’s end. He had no rope to help him, of course, but he used his alpenstock with one hand, and drove his boots firmly into the snow with a sideways motion which made a little step for him.
“Guess old Uncle Bill knows his way about,” thought Bennie.