And what if your spirit does not go out to meet the spirit of the woods halfway? Then, the woods will close round you with a chill loneliness unutterable. You are an alien and an exile. They will have none of you and will reveal to you none of their joyous, dauntless life secrets.
CHAPTER II
AMONG THE NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST
You have not ridden far towards the ranger's house in the Forest before you become aware that clothing for town is not clothing for the wilds. No matter how hot it may be at midday, in this high, rare air a chill comes soon as the sun begins to sink. To be comfortable, light flannels must be worn next the skin, with an extra heavy coat available—never farther away from yourself than the pack straps. Night may overtake you on a hard trail. Long as you have an extra heavy coat and a box of matches, night does not matter. You are safer benighted in the wilds than in New York or Chicago. If you have camp fire and blanket, night in the wilds knows nothing of the satyr-faced spirit of evil, sand-bagger and yeggman, that stalks the town.
To anyone used to travel in the wilderness, it seems almost like little boys playing Robinson Crusoe to give explicit directions as to dress. Yet only a few years ago, the world was shocked and horrified by the death of a town man exploring the wilds; and that death was directly traceable to a simple matter of boots. His feet played out. He had gone into a country of rocky portages with only one pair of moccasins. I have never gone into the wilds for longer than four months at a time. Yet I have never gone with less than four sets of footgear. Primarily, you need a pair of good outing boots; and outing boots are good only when they combine two qualities—comfort and thick enough soles to protect your feet from sharp rock edges if you climb, broad enough soles, too, to protect the edge of your feet from hard knocks from passing trees and jars in the stirrup. For the rest, you need about two extras in case you chip chunks out of these in climbing; and if you camp near glaciers or snow fields, a pair of moccasins for night wear will add to comfort. You may get them if you like to spend the money—$8 leggings and $8 horsehide shoes and cowboy hat and belted corduroy suit and all the other paraphernalia by which the seasoned Westerner recognizes the tenderfoot. You may get them if you want to. It will not hurt you; but a $3 cowboy slicker for rainy days and a pair of boots guaranteed to let the water out as fast as it comes in, these and the ordinary outing garments of any other part of the world are the prime essentials.
This matter of proper preparation recalls a little English woman who determined to train her boys and girls to be resourceful and independent by taking them camping each summer in the forests of the Pacific Coast. They were on a tramp one day twelve miles from camp when a heavy fog blew in, and they lost themselves. That is not surprising when you consider the big tree country. Two notches and one blaze mark the bounds of the National Forests; one notch and one blaze, the trail; but they had gone off the trail trout fishing. "If they had been good path-finders, they could have found the way out by following the stream down," remarked a critic of this little group to me; and a very apt criticism it was from the safe vantage point of a study chair. How about it, if when you came to follow the stream down, it chanced to cut through a gorge you couldn't follow, with such a sheer fall of rock at the sides and such a crisscross of big trees, house-high, that you were driven back from the stream a mile or two? You would keep your directions by sunlight? Maybe; but that big tree region is almost impervious to sunlight; and when the fog blows in or the clouds blow down thick as wool, you will need a pocket compass to keep the faintest sense of direction. Compass signs of forest-lore fail here. There are few flowers under the dense roofing to give you sense of east or west; and you look in vain for the moss sign on the north bark of the tree. All four sides are heavily mossed; and where the little Englishwoman lost herself, they were in ferns to their necks.
"Weren't the kiddies afraid?" I asked.
"Not a bit! Bob got the trout ready; and Son made a big fire. We curled ourselves up round it for the night; and I wish you could have seen the children's delight when the clouds began to roll up below in the morning. It was like a sea. The youngsters had never seen clouds take fire from the sun coming up below. I want to tell you, too, that we put out every spark of that fire before we left in the morning."
All of which conveys its own moral for the camper in the National Forests.
It ought not to be necessary to say that you cannot go to the National Forests expecting to billet yourself at the ranger's house. Many of the rangers are married and have a houseful of their own. Those not married, have no facilities whatever for taking care of you. In my visit to the Vasquez Forest, I happened to have a letter of introduction to the ranger and his mother, who took me in with that bountiful hospitality characteristic of the frontier; but directly across the road from the ranger's cabin was a little log slab-sided hotel where any comer could have stayed in perfect comfort for $7 a week; and at the station, where the train stopped, was another very excellent little hotel where you could have stayed and enjoyed meals that for nutritious cooking might put a New York dinner to shame—all to the tune of $10 a week. Also, at this very station, is the Supervisor's office of the Forestry Department. By inquiry here, the newcomer can ascertain all facts as to tenting outfit and camping place. Only one point must be kept in mind—do not go into the National Forests expecting the railroads, or the rangers, or Providence, to look after you. Do not go unless you are prepared to look after yourself.
And now that you are in the National Forests, what are you going to do? You can ride; or you can hunt; or you can fish; or you can bathe in the hot springs that dot so many of these intermountain regions, where God has landscaped the playground for a nation; or you can go in for records mountain climbing; or you can go sightseeing in the most marvelously beautiful mountain scenery in the whole world; or you can prowl round the prehistoric cave and cliff dwellings of a race who flourished in mighty power, now solitary and silent cities, contemporaneous with that Egyptian desert runner whose skeleton lies in the British Museum marked 20,000 BC It isn't every day you can wander through the deserted chambers of a king's palace with 500 rooms. Tourist agencies organize excursion parties for lesser and younger palaces in Europe. I haven't heard of any to visit the silent cities of the cliff and cave dwellers on the Jemez Plateau of New Mexico, or the Gila River, Arizona, or even the easily accessible dead cities of forgotten peoples in the National Forest of Southern Colorado. What race movement in the first place sent these races perching their wonderful tier-on-tier houses literally on the tip-top of the world?
The prehistoric remains of the Southwest are now, of course, under the jurisdiction of the Forestry Department; and you can't go digging and delving and carrying relics from the midden heaps and baked earthen floors without the permission of the Secretary of Agriculture; but if