The Cordova daily times., 1920-07-21
BY MARY BAEN WRIGHT

Last Friday the curtain of mist which for several days had narrowed the stage of our town life, lifted to reveal a wonderful background of green-forested foothills and jagged rocky crests of snow-patched noun tains outlined upon brilliant blue sky. A perfect day for mountain climbing, thought Miss Margaret Kol- benson, her guest, Miss Myra Phillips, and her roommate, Miss Mary Baen Wright. So, plotting an assault upon 1 Mount Eccles, they immediately began 1 boiling eggs and spreading slices of ! bread with deviled ham.
 Though the face which Eccles turns towards Cordova is stern, forbidding and merciless, he is not utterly un- approachable. He's not as bad as he looks, but he's bad enough. You have to sneak up on him from behind
 Noon found the trio entering the slashed trail back of Beachway, which they followed to a dilapidated skid road By the time they had toiled to the top of this they felt quite equal to tripping up the five-foot steps of the pyramid of Cheops. Fine training, that skid-road, for anyone planning a tour of Egypt!
 The upper end of the old skid-road opens upon beautiful green meadows, dotted with violets, buttercups and pale purple daisies. Here and there the water of the squashy tundra has drained into pools upon whose quiet surfaces float yellow water lilies. On the banks the girls found that curious little varnicorous plant, the sun-dew, and watched with interest the delicate red fuzz of the leaves fold down upon tiny gnats and "no-see-'ems."
 A short distance on lay the city reservoir the terminus of a pipe line which led back into the hills to a roaring waterfall. Along this banked up pipe line the girls walked, spring ing across the soft places, but some times not nimbly enough to prevent their being swallowed to the knees in ! the muck.
 They left the pipe line patch to fol low the bed of a stream strewn with great chunks of petrified wood, and soon encountered some real climbing on a slope so steep and slippery as to be almost insuperable. By throwing their lunch boxes on ahead and dig ging with their fingers into the slope they finally reached the next bench. From here the ascent was difficult. 1 The three waded the narrow beds of tumbling streams, dug feet and hands into almost perpendicular snowbanks, and zigzagged sideways across the slopes, clutching for dear life to every | fragile bush and plant in reach.
 1 Far aloft in the blue, above the smoke and stir of this dim spot that men call earth" circled a magnificent bald eagle, looking down disdainfully upon the painful upward struggle of the three humans. They, for their part, scarcely dared to glance down upon the dizzying depths beneath, re- membering the fate of the Seattle teacher who toppled off Pinnacle peak on Mount Rainier a few years since, and rolled and bounced down the mountain side to Paradise valley, a mile below.
 Climbing became easier near the summit, where the rocks and scrub spruces began to jut out. One of the climbers, seeing herself far out-dis- enced companions, and reaching a slope which offered no foothold what ever, unlaced her hiking shoes and squirmed to the top without them.
 There, while refreshing their weary 1 bodies with a mess which had orig inally been sandwiches, cake, boiled eggs, bananas, pickles and chocolate, the three teachers agreed that noun l tain climbing was like getting an edu-