Most emphatically, the trip across the Cascades at Doubtful Lake and
Cascade Pass is not a trip for a woman in the present condition of
things, although any woman who can ride can cross Cloudy Pass and get
down Agnes Creek way. But perhaps before this is published, the Chelan
National Forest will have been made a National Park. It ought to be. It
is superb. There is no other word for it. And it ought not to be called
a forest, because it seems to have everything but trees. Rocks and
rivers and glaciers--more in one county than in all Switzerland, they
claim--and granite peaks and hair-raising precipices and lakes filled
with ice in midsummer. But not many trees, until, at Cascade Pass, one
reaches the boundaries of the Washington National Forest and begins to
descend the Pacific slope.
The personnel of our party was slightly changed. Of the original one,
there remained the Head, the Big, the Middle, and the Little Boy, Joe,
Bob, and myself. To these we added at the beginning six persons besides
our guides and packers. Two of them did not cross the pass, however--the
Forest Pathologist from Washington, who travels all over the country
watching for tree-diseases and tree-epidemics and who left us after a
few days, and the Supervisor of Chelan Forest, who had but just come
from Oregon and was making his first trip over his new territory.
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