As it gets lighter and the sun comes up red and hot out of the desert we have a grand view of the great spread of the country to south and of the great snow mountain to the north and east, the peak standing over the place where we left our wagons nineteen days before, on the edge of Death Valley.

The glare of the snow on the sun makes us nearly blind, but we hurry on to try to cross it before it becomes so soft as to slump under our feet.

It is two or three feet in the deepest places, and probably has been three times as deep when freshly fallen, but it is now solid and icy.

Our rawhide moccasins protect our feet from cold, and both we and the animals got along fairly well, the oxen breaking through occasionally as the snow softened up, but generally walking on the top as we did ourselves.

The snow field reached much farther down the western slope than we had hoped, much farther than on the eastern side.