-
"The Marks On The Trees, Which Had Been Our Chief Dependence,
Are Much Fewer And More Difficult To Be Distinguished Than We
Had Supposed.
But our guides traverse this trackless region
with a kind of instinctive sagacity; they never hesitate,
they are never embarrassed; and so undeviating is their step,
that wherever the snow has disappeared, for even a hundred paces,
we find the summer road.
With their aid the snow is scarcely
a disadvantage; for though we are often obliged to slip down,
yet the fallen timber and the rocks, which are now covered,
were much more troublesome when we passed in the autumn.
Travelling is indeed comparatively pleasant, as well as more rapid,
the snow being hard and coarse, without a crust, and perfectly hard
enough to prevent the horses sinking more than two or three inches.
After the sun has been on it for some hours it becomes softer
than it is early in the morning; yet they are almost always
able to get a sure foothold."
On the twenty-ninth of June the party were well out of the snows
in which they had been imprisoned, although they were by no means
over the mountain barrier that had been climbed so painfully during
the past few days. Here they observed the tracks of two barefooted
Indians who had evidently been fleeing from their enemies,
the Pahkees. These signs disturbed the Indian guides,
for they at once said that the tracks were made by their friends,
the Ootlashoots, and that the Pahkees would also cut them
(the guides) off on their return from the trip over the mountains.
On the evening of the day above mentioned, the party camped at
the warm springs which fall into Traveller's-rest Creek, a point
now well known to the explorers, who had passed that way before.
Of the springs the journal says:
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 305 of 362
Words from 92978 to 93289
of 110166
