Mr. Rogers pointed down into Tuckerman’s Ravine, the wooded floor of which, sheltering the dark mirror of Hermit Lake, lay over fifteen hundred feet below them. “Golly, where’s your parachute?” said Peanut. “We don’t need a parachute,” Mr. Rogers laughed. “Here’s the path.” The boys looked over into the pit. Across the ravine rose another precipitous wall, with a lump at the end called the Lion’s Head. The ravine itself was like a long, narrow horseshoe cut into the rocky side of Mount Washington--a horseshoe more than a thousand feet deep. They were on one side of the open end. “Well, here goes!” cried Peanut, and he began to descend. At first the trail went down over a series of levels, or steps, close to the edge of the precipice. At one point this precipice seemed actually to hang out over the gulf below, and it seemed as if they could throw a stone into Hermit Lake. Peanut tried it, in fact, but the stone sailed out, descended, and disappeared, as if under the wall. “These are the hanging cliffs,” said Mr. Rogers. “We’ll go down faster soon.” Presently the path did swing back to the left, and began to drop right down the cliff side. The cliff wall wasn’t quite so steep as it had looked from above, and the path was perfectly possible for travel; but it was the steepest thing they had tackled yet, nonetheless, and it kept them so busy dropping down the thousand feet or more to the ravine floor that they could barely take time to glance at the great, white mass of snow packed into the semi-shadow under the head wall. “Say, we are making some time, though!” Peanut panted, as he dropped his own length from one rock to the next. “Faster’n you’d make coming back,” laughed Lou. The path soon dropped them into scrub spruce, which had climbed up the ravine side to meet them, and this stiff spruce grew taller and taller as they descended, till in less than fifteen minutes they were once more--for the first time since leaving the side of Clinton--in the woods. At the bottom of the cliff the path leveled out, crossed a brook twice, and brought them suddenly into another trail, leading up into the head of the ravine. Almost opposite was a sign pointing down another path to the Appalachian Mountain Club camp. “We’ll leave our stuff there at the camp,” said Mr. Rogers, “and go see the snow arch before lunch, eh?” “You bet!” the boys cried. It was only a few minutes after ten. They had started so early from the summit of Washington that they still had the better part of the day before them. A few steps brought them to the camp, which was a log and bark lean-to, with the back and sides enclosed, built facing the six or eight foot straight side of a huge boulder. This boulder side was black with the smoke of many fires. It was no more than four feet away from the front of the lean-to, so that a big fire, built against it, would throw back a lot of warmth right into the shelter. All about the hut were beautiful thick evergreens.