My experience in camping trips of various sorts has been that the
start from headquarters occupies more time than any similar
preparation. Once on the road, things naturally arrange themselves
into some kind of a system, and an hour on the road in the evening
means several hours gained the next morning. Added to this, there are
always a number of loafers about railroad towns, and small things have
a way of disappearing. With this in mind, I determined to make my
start that evening, and at 7 P.M. on the 23d of May, 1913, I embarked
on a six to eight mile an hour current, paced by cottonwood logs,
carried down by the flood from the head waters in Wyoming, Utah, and
Colorado.
When sailing on the unruffled current one did not notice its
swiftness--it sped so quietly yet at the same time with such deadly
intent--until some half submerged cottonwood snags appeared, their
jagged, broken limbs ploughing the stream exactly like the bow of a
motor-driven boat, throwing two diverging lines of waves far down the
stream. One would almost think the boat was motionless, it raced so
smoothly,--and that the snags were tearing upstream as a river man had
said, the day before, "like a dog with a bone in his teeth." A sunken
stone-boat, with a cabin half submerged, seemed propelled by some
unseen power and rapidly dwindled in the distance.
So fascinating were these things that I forgot the approaching night.
I first noticed it when the stream slackened its mad pace and spread
over its banks into great wide marshes, in divided and subdivided
channels and over submerged islands, with nothing but willow and fuzzy
cattail tops to indicate that there was a bottom underneath.
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