e for her night out on top of the world.

A compass is limited in its usefulness partly because it is sometimes,
though rarely, affected by mineral deposits and goes wrong, but mostly
because a lost person seldom thinks he is lost and traveling in the
wrong direction, but instead doubts the accuracy of the compass. At
most he will admit he is off the trail, but he does not think that is
synonymous with being lost. His tracks will record the uncertainty of
his mind, wavering, haphazard, indefinite, but he will not admit, even
to himself, that he is lost.

There are a few general rules followed by searchers for lost people.
If the proposed destination or general direction in which they
disappeared is known, the rescuers take the trail and track them.
Every trail, even across windswept bare rocks high above the
timberline, as is the Long's Peak trail, has occasional deposits of
soft sand in which footprints may be imprinted. And as I have said
before, the area which must be searched is restricted by confining
cliffs and ridges. A lost person who cannot find his way back over the
trail he has come, shows wisdom in following down a stream which will
eventually bring him to habitations in the valley below.

Whether or not searching parties start out at once for the unfortunate
climber depends on the character of the country he was bound for. If
his goal is the summit of a high, bleak peak like Long's; or a glacier,
it is imperative to start at once as the temperature above the
timberline is often below freezing, even during the summer months. But
if the country is not so menacing, the searchers delay, hoping the lost
person, like Bo Peep's sheep, will come home unsought, as indeed he
generally does.

Most of the lost are found, but a few persons have vanished never to be
seen again. The Reverend Sampson disappeared supposedly somewhere
along the Continental Divide between Estes Park and Grand Lake, and
though parties made up of guides, rangers and settlers searched for
more than a week, they found no trace of the missing man. I was in the
town of Walden, North Park, late one fall when a woodsman came down
from the mountains west of the Park with some human bones he had found
near the top of the Divide. By the marks on its barrel, the rusty
rifle lying near the bones was identified as one belonging to a man who
had been lost while on a hunting trip thirty years before.

One moonlight night I had an extraordinary