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During the open season on superintendents, some three months in duration, he does not sleep at all. For one month after the first snowfall he digs a hole beneath a rock, somewhere above timberline, and falls into a torpor, using no food for thirty days. Then he goes to Washington to meet the Director of Parks, after which he gets no more sleep until next fall.
No matter how difficult, how slow my progress, it never became tedious there was always the unexpected, the mysterious, as a guarantee against monotony. Timberline always interested me and those vast, naked plateaus above it never ceased to move me to wonder miles and miles of great, granite desert, up-flung into space. The very tip-top of the world.
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.
There were other reasons which would ordinarily have disturbed Bill and brought him home even ahead of time. Snow had fallen heavily above the timberline a few days before, and now the keen whistling of the wind and the swift curtaining of clouds, which was drawing across the sky, threatened a new storm that might even reach down to the shack. And yet no Bill appeared.
But I was on an exposed shoulder of the mountain, above timberline, and it would be impossible to live through the night without shelter and fire. I headed downhill without regard for direction. I was becoming numb, but in half an hour I safely reached the dwarf trees at timberline and plunged through them to a dense grove of spruce.
In some sheltered camp nest on the edge of the timberline one may lie snug and warm, but after the long shuffle on snowshoes we may have to wait more than a month ere the heavens open and the grand show is unveiled. In the mean time, bread may be scarce, unless with careful forecast a sufficient supply has been provided and securely placed during the summer.
The searching party found it almost impossible to battle their way above the timberline and after many ineffectual attempts, they returned, nearly frozen, without tidings of the lost girl. William S. Copper, Carl Piltz and myself set out at midnight for the Peak. The wind that met us at the timberline halted our horses, even jolted them off the trail.
Generally, the cattle and horses are grazed in the valleys and on the lower slopes of the mountain. The sheep and goats are pastured on the high mountain sides and in the grassy meadows at or above timberline. Preferences to graze live stock on the forest ranges are for the most part granted to stockmen who own improved ranch property and live in or near one of the National Forests.
But now, looking on the mountains for himself, he decided, with a start of the heart, that they were beautiful beautiful and terrible at once, with the reality that he had never found in his books. What leveled spear of a knight, in the pages of romance, could equal the invisible thrust of this wind? He reached the timberline.
Still higher up the sallow forest of lodgepole pines began; and above these, beyond the timberline, rose the bald summit itself. They were big men, framed for such a country, defying the roughness with a roughness of their own these stalwart sons of old Bill Campbell.
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