ing sight of a camping-trip is two cooks bending over an
iron grating above a fire, one frying trout and the other turning
flapjacks.

Our trail led us through one of the few remaining unknown portions of
the United States. It cannot long remain unknown. It is too superb, too
wonderful. And it has mineral in it, silver and copper and probably
coal. The Middle Boy, who is by way of being a chemist and has
systematically blown himself up with home-made explosives for years--the
Middle Boy found at least a dozen silver mines of fabulous value,
although the men in the party insisted that his specimens were iron
pyrites and other unromantic minerals.

XI

LAKE CHELAN TO LYMAN LAKE

Now, as to where we were--those long days of fording rivers and beating
our way through jungle or of dizzy climbs up to the snow, those short
nights, so cold that six blankets hardly kept us warm, while our tired
horses wandered far, searching for such bits of grass as grew among the
shale.

In the north-central part of the State of Washington, Nature has done a
curious thing. She has built a great lake in the eastern shoulders of
the Cascade Mountains. Lake Chelan, more than fifty miles long and
averaging a mile and a half in width, is ten hundred and seventy-five
feet above sea-level, while its bottom is four hundred feet below the
level of the ocean. It is almost completely surrounded by granite walls
and peaks which reach more than a mile and a half into the air.

The region back from the lake is practically unknown. A small part of it
has never been touched by the Geological Survey, and, in one or two
instances, we were able to check up errors on our maps. Thus, a lake
shown on our map as belonging at the head of McAllister Creek really
belongs at the head of Rainbow Creek, while McAllister Lake is not shown
at all. Mr. Coulter, a forester who was with us for a time, last year
discovered three lakes at the head of Rainbow Creek which have never
been mapped, and, so far as could be learned, had never been seen by a
white man before. Yet Lake Chelan itself is well known in the Northwest.
It is easily reached, its gateway being the famous Wenatchee Valley,
celebrated for its apples.

It was from Chelan that we were to make our start. Long before we
arrived, Dan Devore and the packers were getting the outfit ready.

[Illustration: _Sitting Bull Mountain, Lake Chelan_]

Yet the first glimpse of Chelan was not attractive. We had