Post 24723
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These parks make ideal camping-places,–wild, beautiful, and alluring in every season. I have enjoyed them when they were white with snow, mysterious with cloud and mist, romantic with moonlight, and knee-deep in the floral wealth of June. Often I have burst out upon a sunny meadow hidden away in the solitude of the forest. As it lies silent in the sunshine, butterflies with beautifully colored wings circle lightly above its brilliant masses of flowers. Here bears prowl, deer feed, and birds assemble in such numbers that the park appears to be their social centre. In these wild gardens the matchless solitaire is found. Often he sings from the top of a spruce and accompanies his song by darting off or upward on happy wings, returning and darting again, singing all the time as if enchanted.
Among the hundreds of these happy resting-grounds in which I have camped, one in the San Juan Mountains has left me the most memories. I came there one evening during a severe gale. The wind roared and thundered as impressively as breakers on a rock-bound shore. By midnight the storm ceased, and the tall trees stood as quietly as if content to rest after their vigorous exercise in the friendly wrestling-match with the wind. The spruces had become towering folded flags of fluffy black. After the gale the sky was luminous with crowding stars. I lingered in the centre of the opening to watch them. The heavens appeared to be made of many star-filled skies, one behind the other. The farthest one was very remote, while the closest seemed strangely near me, just above the tops of the trees.
Many times I have come out of the subdued light of the pathless forest to enjoy these sunny openings. Often I have stood within them watching the butterflies circling in the sun or a deer and her fawns feeding quietly across, and, as I looked, I have listened to the scolding of the squirrel and the mellow ringing of the woodpecker far away in the forest. Here I have watched the coming storm, have enjoyed its presence, and in its breaking have seen the brilliant bow rest its foundations in front of the trees just across the meadow. Sometimes the moon showed its soft bow in the edge of the advancing or the breaking storm.