Realizing the importance of traveling as lightly as possible during my hasty trip through the Uncompahgre Mountains, I allowed myself to believe that the golden days would continue. Accordingly I set off with no bedding, with but little food, and without even snowshoes. A few miles up the trail, above Lake City, I met a prospector¹ coming down and out of these mountains for the winter. "Yes," he said, "the first snow usually is a heavy one, and I am going out now for fear of being snowed-in for the winter." My imagination at once pictured the grand mountains deeply, splendidly covered with snow, myself by a camp-fire in a solemn primeval forest without food or bedding, a camp-bird on a near-by limb sympathizing with me in low, confiding² tones, the snow waist-deep and mountains-wide. Then I dismissed the imaginary picture of winter and joyfully³ climbed the grand old mountains amid the low[Pg 224] and leafless aspens and the tall and richly robed firs.

I was impelled⁴ to try to make this mountain realm a National Forest and felt that sometime it would become a National Park. The wonderful reports of prospectors⁵ about the scenery of this region, together with what I knew of it from incomplete exploration, eloquently⁶ urged this course upon me. My plan was to make a series of photographs, from commanding heights and slopes, that would illustrate⁷ the forest wealth and the scenic⁸ grandeur⁹ of this wonderland. In the centre Uncompahgre Peak rose high, and by girdling it a little above the timber I obtained a number of the desired photographs, and then hurried from height to height, taking other pictures of towering summits or their slopes below that were black and purpling with impressive, pathless forests.

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