Down The Columbia

The day on which I first conceived the idea of a boat trip down the Columbia hangs in a frame all its own in the corridors of my memory. It was a number of years ago—more than a dozen, I should say. Just previously I had contrived somehow to induce the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to grant me permission to attempt a winter journey on ski around this most beautiful of America’s great playgrounds. He had even sent a Government scout along to keep, or help, me out of trouble. We were a week out from the post at Mammoth Hot Springs. Putting the rainbow revel of the incomparable Canyon behind, we had crossed Yellowstone Lake on the ice and fared onward and upward until we came at last to the long climb where the road under its ten feet of snow wound up to the crest of the Continental Divide. It was so dry and cold that the powdery snow overlying the crust rustled under our ski like autumn leaves. The air was diamond clear, so transparent that distant mountain peaks, juggled in the wizardry of the lens of the light, seemed fairly to float upon the eyeball. At the summit, where we paused for breath, an old Sergeant of the Game Patrol, letting down a tin can on a string, brought up drinks from an air-hole which he claimed was teetering giddily upon the very ridge-pole of North America. “If I dip to the left,” he said, suiting the action to the word, “it’s the Pacific I’ll be robbing of a pint of Rocky Mountain dew; while if I dip to the right it’s the Atlantic that’ll have to settle back a notch. And if I had a string long enough, and a wing strong enough, to cast my can over there beyond Jackson’s Hole,” he went on, pointing southeasterly to the serrated peaks of the Wind River Mountains, “I could dip from the fount of the Green River and keep it from feeding the Colorado and the Gulf of California by so much.”