ator's son. "Some day,"
Radcliffe had challenged them, "you want to see Glacier National Park,
with its ice-capped peaks and its precipices thousands of feet deep, its
glacier-fed lakes and Alpine scenery. And of course you must all see the
geysers of the Yellowstone, its petrified forests and mud volcanoes."

"And bears?" Ted had laughed with a glance at Pedro.

"Yes, all sorts of wild animals. And some time you want to explore the
cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde and the 14,000-foot peaks in Rocky Mountain
National Park. By that time you will be ready to go to Southern Alaska
and try Mt. McKinley, which is worth while not so much because it is the
highest mountain in North America, (Mt. Whitney is nearly as high), but
because it stands the highest above the surrounding country of any
mountain in the world. Mt. Whitney is just an easy climb above a sea of
surrounding peaks; you don't realize the height at all.

"Then you know we have a National Park in Hawaii?--But Roosevelt,--or
Greater Sequoia Park,--is going to remain an unspoiled wilderness for a
good many years to come, with three great canyons larger than that of
Yosemite itself."

"Kings' River and the Kern," Ace had agreed, "but what is the third?"

"Tehipite."

"Oh, of course."

"We wanted to go over the John Muir Trail right along the crest of the
Sierras to Yosemite."

"You've hundreds of miles of almost unexplored country! Enough vacation
places to last a lifetime! Rivers alive with trout! Bears! Cougars!" the
Ranger had commented.

"And rattlers," Long Lester had added grimly.

"And rattlers. And they're the only living thing we need fear."

"Not excluding range cattle?" Pedro had wanted to be assured.

"Not when you're all together. Of course if you were alone you might
break a leg or something that would leave you helpless, and you'd sure be
a long way from anything to eat unless you had it with you.

"But unless we look alive the Big Interests are going to wrest away these
beauty spots that we have set aside for our National playgrounds,"
Radcliffe had declared.

"That's just what Dad says!" Ace had remembered.

"And why? Not because they need the irrigation and water power of the big
falls, for they can have it after the streams leave the parks, but
because it would cost them a good deal less to secure these things of
Uncle Sam than it would to build their projects outside Park limits.
There isn't a beauty spot in the West that some comm