Tenting To-Night; A Chronicle Of Sport And Adventure In Glacier Park And The Cascade Mountains

In the early days of Glacier National Park, when the mountains still felt wholly wild and the trails were new to human feet, Mary Roberts Rinehart packed her camping gear and set out to chronicle an America on the edge of vanishing. This is adventure writing from a vanished era: the author sleeping under cathedral pines, waking to moose browsing in alpine meadows, scaling peaks that had never seen a climber, and trading stories with the last generation of Blackfeet and Flathead guides who remembered the old ways. Rinehart brings her mystery-writer's eye for detail and tension to the wilderness, finding drama in a grizzly's fresh tracks, in the weather sweeping down from the Divide, in the simple heroism of making camp before dark. The Cascade Mountains stretch the journey westward, through old-growth forests and volcanic grandeur, toward the Pacific. A century later, these places remain, but the America Rinehart describes, its vast quiet, its untraveled distances, has largely passed into memory. For readers who long for the open road and the tent pitched beside a silver river, this chronicle is a time machine.