Colonel Frémont and the other messes had worked down the new drainage, finding the way easy. They were even riding their packs on the slopes and enjoying the sledding. I watched them vanish far below, around a bend where the forest projected into the creek bottoms, and then all was quiet. It was a grand, mild winter day, the sort when the sun warms not just the flesh but the heart and soul. The winds had died away, and only gentle zephyrs played with our coats and hats that last day of 1848. I had never seen a bluer sky. A vast sea of white stretched serenely in all directions, dotted only by what seemed to be scrub forest except that what we were seeing was the needled tips of fifty-foot pines which now lay buried. I ascribe that benevolent weather to my survival, for surely I would have perished had another storm raked us just then. My brothers, Ned and Richard, and Captain Cathcart had observed my distress. At the worst of it on the thirtieth, when we were struggling upslope and over the saddle, I gave out after a couple hundred yards and could do no more than crawl on hands and knees.
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