“The marks on the trees, which had been our chief dependence, are much fewer and more difficult to be distinguished than we had supposed.  But our guides traverse this trackless region with a kind of instinctive sagacity; they never hesitate, they are never embarrassed; and so undeviating is their step, that wherever the snow has disappeared, for even a hundred paces, we find the summer road.  With their aid the snow is scarcely a disadvantage; for though we are often obliged to slip down, yet the fallen timber and the rocks, which are now covered, were much more troublesome when we passed in the autumn.  Travelling is indeed comparatively pleasant, as well as more rapid, the snow being hard and coarse, without a crust, and perfectly hard enough to prevent the horses sinking more than two or three inches.  After the sun has been on it for some hours it becomes softer than it is early in the morning; yet they are almost always able to get a sure foothold.”

On the twenty-ninth of June the party were well out of the snows in which they had been imprisoned, although they were by no means over the mountain barrier that had been climbed so painfully during the past few days.  Here they observed the tracks of two barefooted Indians who had evidently been fleeing from their enemies, the Pahkees.  These signs disturbed the Indian guides, for they at once said that the tracks were made by their friends, the Ootlashoots, and that the Pahkees would also cut them (the guides) off on their return from the trip over the mountains.  On the evening of the day above mentioned, the party camped at the warm springs which fall into Traveller’s-rest Creek, a point now well known to the explorers, who had passed that way before.  Of the springs the journal says:—­

“These warm springs are situated at the foot of a hill on the north side of Traveller’s-rest Creek, which is ten yards wide at this place.  They issue from the bottoms, and through the interstices of a gray freestone rock, which rises in irregular masses round their lower side.  The principal spring, which the Indians have formed into a bath by stopping the run with stone and pebbles, is about the same temperature as the warmest bath used at the hot springs in Virginia.  On trying, Captain Lewis could with difficulty remain in it nineteen minutes, and then was affected with a profuse perspiration.  The two other springs are much hotter, the temperature being equal to that of the warmest of the hot springs in Virginia.  Our men, as well as the Indians, amused themselves with going into the bath; the latter, according to their universal custom, going first into the hot bath, where they remain as long as they can bear the heat, then plunging into the creek, which is now of an icy coldness, and repeating this operation several times, but always ending with the warm bath.”