One more side trip to illustrate the attractive variety offered on the outing. Leaving main camp after an early supper, a party of four again took the Hector trail. On the trail near Sherbrooke Lake they met a bear. Our sleeping-bags had been taken down that afternoon, and we had hardly placed them in the spare tent near Wapta Lake, when a wind arose and a thunderstorm broke, driving every mosquito away and us into the tent. Thence we comfortably watched the tent illuminated by lightning flashes and viewed fantastic shadows thrown on the canvas by the powerful headlight of some huge engine as it rounded the curve close by with its burden of transcontinental freight. We rose with the sun and after a hasty breakfast started forth in the thunder-cleared air up Cataract Creek to Lake O'Hara. This lake is several miles long and completely encircled by snow peaks. Wiwaxy with its curiously turreted sides suggests feudal castles, one above another. Leaving O'Hara, we kept on to Lake McArthur, which occupies a royal place with two guardian peaks nearby and a glacier sloping to the water's edge. Miniature icebergs float in the wonderful blue, mountain goats dislodge rocks far above, ptarmigan call their dainty chicks from hiding-places in the white-belled heather, diminutive arctic rabbits bounce here and there among the mountain daisies, and marmots test the echoes with their shrill whistle. This lake is the gem of all.

We tramped twenty-five miles before we reached main camp again. But it was a day well spent and never to be forgotten. At the campfire in the evening we listened to good addresses, songs and stories, and heard how the porcupine had chewed shoes and camera cases, invaded the ladies' quarters, and had driven some of the timid ones from their tents. All too soon the outing ended and everyone turned reluctantly homeward.

THE GOLDEN TROUT OF COTTONWOOD

LAKES.

BY FRED KOCH.

The snow was still on the ground when we got there, young Dutcher and I, with our pack trains, and as the sun was going down, we unloaded the mules, and picked out a little clear spot on the edge of the meadow, where we built a fire, hoping to dry off a small space before turning in for the night. June sixteenth seemed pretty late in the season to us when we left the desert with its temperature of over a hundred in the shade, but it seemed very early when we emerged from the scant yellow pine belt and plunged into the tamaracks ten thousand feet above sea level. The ascent had been sudden, for we had climbed along the precipitous sides of the great fault of the eastern slope of the Sierra, ascending in one place three thousand feet in less than three miles. At ten thousand five hunded feet, the shady nooks were still covered with snow, while far above us we could see the precipitous cliffs with great snow banks at their feet.

We comprised one section of the Death Valley expedition, which in 1891 spent half a year hunting and trapping in the heart of the desert, and now the two of us were to spend three months studying the birds and mammals of the High Sierra, and with our barometers and other instruments make meteorological observations at an altitude of over ten thousand feet.

At Lone Pine, at the eastern base of the mountain, people hinted at the wonderful trout we would find in Cottonwood and Volcano Creeks, and described them in a manner fit to make our mouths water; so we were a happy pair of youngsters, when, a little after noon, we poked our heads through the clouds, as it were, and crossing the first bridge, started to clamber down the

Devil's Ladder, as the packers called it, to the Little Cottonwood at its foot. This is the steepest place along the Hockett Trail, and it certainly warrants the name, for it seemed more like riding down a spiral staircase than anything else.

After a mile or more of gradual climb along the course of the Little Cottonwood, we turned sharply to the left and followed an indistinct blazed trail until it pitched down to the crossing of the Big Cottonwood. Two miles above the crossing close to the bank, we stopped and prepared the place which we were to call a temporary home for the next three months. We were at the edge of a ten acre mountain meadow, and our first night was spent within a rod of a big snow bank.

We were astir early the next morning. While the mush was cooking, I located some likely looking pools in which the trout were darting to and fro, jumping at the bits of floating sticks and chips which I threw in. I must confess that on this occasion it was not the prospective sport that lured me from the camp fire, but the chance to fill a pan with crisp brown trout, and for once give us a change from the everlasting salt-horse and sowbelly which had been our regular fare for the past three months.

It was very hard to have to arrange camp, and get things settled generally, before starting out to try for the trout. But it had to be done, and it was not until nearly the end of the afternoon that I cut my willow pole, fastened a few yards of shoe thread to it, and baited my hook with some bluebottle flies that we found spending the lunch hour on an opened can of corned beef.

Just beside our camp the water swirled under a great pine log and fell with a roar to a pool beneath, covering the surface with foam and digging out the overhanging bank. The water was so very turbulent that I thought it unnecessary to take the usual precautions to keep out of sight, so I stood on the edge of the bank, and threw my hook above the falls, letting it drift over to the pool.

My line had no sooner fallen in the whirling foam beneath the falls when from all sides dark streaks seemed to rush toward it, and in a twinkling it was swishing through the water. I did not play him, nor did I let him play with me. The vision of the sputtering frying pan and the browning fish was before me, and with a heave ho! such as one uses to pull out a sucker or a carp, I yanked him up on the bank behind me. He was not very big, perhap ten inches long, but oh, the colors! They were too brilliant to seem natural. From head to tail a broad scarlet stripe stretched, interrupted here and there by blotches of brown; beneath, a beautiful canary yellow merging to orange, while the tips of both tail and fins were white, and faintly discernable, as though washed over by the other colors, were scores of speckles. The tail, heavily spotted, was large and gave the impression of power, while voracity was evident in the big jaws. armed with sharp teeth.

It was not until a year or two later that Dr. Jordan got hold of one and named it Salmo mykiss aqua-bonita -surely a beautiful trout of beautiful waters.

But aside from its scientific baptism it had been known as the Golden trout for years by the few people who had seen it and the many who had heard of it.

After the first it was easy. Any day one could go but a few yards from the camp and catch all that were needed, no matter how large the family to be fed.

The largest fish were found in the riffles, while any size from six to ten inches could be found in almost any hole. In fact I never saw trout so plentiful, and with the crude appliances at hand I had no trouble in landing ten in fifteen minutes one day when I chose to time the operation. The largest fish measured just eleven and a quarter inches in length, and the next year on reporting this to the fish commission I was told that this was the largest on record. Cottonwood Creek is almost free from brush and with the trout as unused to man as they were, the fishing was ideal.

Some weeks later I had to go several miles up stream to set my traps, and was delighted to discover a great chain of Alpine lakes feeding the creek. In fact, after exploring the west branch of Cottonwood we counted a total of twenty-one lakes feeding the stream. But there were no trout in them at all; in fact, none above a series of falls aggregating some fifty feet, which tumbled over the rocks below.

. From some stockmen whom I found riding the range, I learned that the trout found in Cottonwood Creek are not indigenous to the stream, but had been brought there some fifteen years before by some sheep men who had found them in Mulkey Creek, a small tributary of the Kern River, just across the divide, some ten miles to the south of our camp. But a baker's dozen were taken from Mulkey to Cottonwood in an old coffee pot, but there seem to have been sufficient, as the latter creek, at the time of our visit, was fairly swarming with them. However, they were not at all plentiful in the lower courses of the stream below the crossing of the Hockett trail, where it is said the first were planted.

Mulkey Creek, from which the trout were taken, drains towards the east, while Cottonwood is lost in the desert, or, at highwater, reaches Owens Lake after a series of great falls down the eastern escarpment of the Sierra. In the course of its meanderings the South Fork of the Kern River, a few miles above its junction with Mulkey Creek, comes within a few yards of Volcano Creek, in which are found a slightly different form of Golden trout, and it is easy to believe that at some time a transfer has been made at this point and the variation in species began.

The Volcano Creek trout has been named Salmo roosevelti by Mr. Evermann in honor of President Roosevelt. It differs from the Whitney and Mulkey Creek specimen in that it has a deeper golden color, and the distribution of speckles is not the same. Neither of these species