All of these are informed by London's adventurous life, which included stints as a sailor and as a gold prospector in the Klondike region of Alaska, where there was a Gold Rush in the 1890s: the setting of ''Up the Slide''.
We know a few important things about the main character, Clay Dilham: he's young (seventeen) and arrogant. He's traveling with a man named Swanson to the village of Dawson to pick up mail. They've camped for the night when Clay boasts he'll be able to return with a sled full of firewood in just 30 minutes. This young whippersnapper is quite proud that he noticed a dead tree other travelers had overlooked. The only problem? It's high up on Moosehead Mountain, on a steep slide, or rock face, covered in snow.
No biggie, Clay thinks to himself. He knows the frozen river is below the tree and thinks that if he chops it down so it falls on the ice, the trunk will shatter into pieces: firewood ready-to-go. The older, more experienced Swanson just laughs at Clay's boldness. We have the sneaking suspicion that the opening of the story is a sign things won't turn out as planned, that this foreshadows, warning or indication, challenges to come.
Conflict: Man vs. Nature
As soon as Clay begins making his way up the slide, he realizes it's much steeper than he thought, and he regrets wearing slick-soled walrus-skin moccasins instead of more rugged footwear. He reaches a patch of snow-covered grass and keeps slipping on it. The only way he can make it through is by digging his bare hand into the snow and frozen dirt to slowly pull himself up. Finally, he makes it up to his tree, and chopping it down turns out to be the easiest part of the whole ordeal.
Clay looks at the way he came up the slide and realizes he'll just keep slipping and falling if he tries to climb back down. He starts to feel tired, but realizes if he stops moving, he'll freeze in the 30-below weather. Clay has underestimated some of the challenges nature can present and overestimated his ability to handle them. This makes ''Up the Slide'' a classic example of the literary conflict called man vs. nature.
