ot.

Then we learned that the purpose of the National Forests is not to
preserve timber but to conserve it. The idea is to sell and reseed.
About twenty-five per cent of the timber we saw was yellow pine. But
most of the timber we saw on the east side of the Cascades will be safe
for some time. I wouldn't undertake to carry out, from most of that
region, enough pine-needles to make a sofa-cushion. It is quite enough
to get oneself out.

Up to now it had been hard going, but not impossible. Now we were to do
the impossible.

It is a curious thing about mountains, but they have a hideous tendency
to fall down. Whole cliff-faces, a mile or so high, are suddenly seized
with a wandering disposition. Leaving the old folks at home and sliding
down into the valleys, they come awful croppers and sustain about eleven
million compound comminuted fractures.

These family breaks are known as rock-slides.

Now to travel twenty feet over a rock-slide is to twist an ankle, bruise
a shin-bone, utterly discourage a horse, and sour the most amiable
disposition.

There is no flat side to these wandering rocks. With the diabolical
ingenuity that nature can show when she goes wrong, they lie edge up. Do
you remember the little mermaid who wished to lose her tail and gain
legs so she could follow the prince? And how her penalty was that every
step was like walking on the edges of swords? That is a mountain
rock-slide, but I do not recall that the little mermaid had to drag a
frightened and slipping horse, which stepped on her now and then. Or
wear riding-boots. Or stop every now and then to be photographed, and
try to persuade her horse to stop also. Or keep looking up to see if
another family jar threatened. Or look around to see if any of the party
or the pack was rolling down over the spareribs of that ghastly
skeleton. No; the little mermaid's problem was a simple and
uncomplicated one.

We were climbing, too. Only one thing kept us going. The narrow valley
twisted, and around each cliff-face we expected the end--either death or
solid ground. But not so, or, at least, not for some hours.
Riding-boots peeled like a sunburnt face; stones dislodged and rolled
down; the sun beat down in early September fury, and still we went on.

[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY A. J. BAKER, KALISPELL, MONT.
_Where the rock-slides start_ (_Glacier National Park_)]

Only three miles it was, but it was as bad a three miles as I have ever
covere