It continued to rain by spells that night and the next morning.  About 11 A.M. we resumed our work on the river.  A short distance below our camp we saw the land-slide which we heard the night before—­tons of earth and shattered rock wrapped about the split and stripped trunks of a half-dozen pines.  The slide was started by the dislodged section of a sheer wall close to the top of the 2700-foot cliff.  We also saw a boat of crude construction, pulled above the high-water mark; evidently abandoned a great while before.  Any person who had to climb the walls at that place had a hard job to tackle, although we could pick out breaks where it looked feasible; there were a few places behind us where it would be next to impossible.  We had only gone over a few rapids when we found a long pool, with driftwood eddying upstream, and knew that our run for the day was over—­the Triplet Rapids were ahead of us.  We found this rapid to be about a fourth of a mile long, divided into three sections as its name indicated, and filled with great boulders at the base of a sheer cliff on the right—­another unrunnable rapid.

Taking the camp material from the boats, we carried it down and pitched our tent first of all, then, while Emery prepared supper, Jimmy and I carried the remaining duffle down to camp.  One of the boats was lined down also.  Then after supper we enjoyed the first rest we had taken for some time.

Camp Ideal we called it, and it well deserved the name.  At the bottom of a tree-covered precipice reaching a height of 2700 feet, was a strip of firm, level sand, tapering off with a slope down to the water, making a perfect landing and dooryard.  A great mass of driftwood, piled up at the end of the rapid, furnished us with all fuel we needed with small effort on our part.  Our tent was backed against a large rock, while other flat rocks near at hand made convenient shelves on which to lay our camp dishes and kettles.  It started to drizzle again that night, but what cared we?  With a roaring fire in front of the tent we all cleaned up for a change, sewed patches on our tattered garments, and, sitting on our beds, wrote the day’s happenings in our journals.  Then we crawled into our comfortable beds, and I was soon dreaming of my boyhood days when I “played hookey” from school and went fishing in a creek that emptied into the Allegheny River, or climbed its rocky banks; to be awakened by Jimmy crying out in his sleep, “There she goes over the rapids.”

Jimmy was soon informed that he and the boats were perfectly safe, and I was brought back to a realization of the fact that I was not going to get a “whaling” for going swimming in dog-days; but instead was holed up in Lodore Canyon, in the extreme northwestern corner of Colorado.

CHAPTER VI

HELL’S HALF MILE