صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

MOUNTAIN EXPLORATION IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES.

SINGULARLY little is known of the wild mountain region lying northwards of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and extending east and west of the Great Divide. Two mighty peaks, Mount Brown and Mount Hooker, marked in most maps as respectively 16,000 and 15,700 feet in height, which rise on either side of the Athabasca Pass, are supposed to dominate this region; and a certain halo of mystery and romance hung over them until in 1893 Professor Coleman of Toronto visited the Pass and pronounced these two mountain giants to be frauds. It was thought, however, that the professor might have been been mistaken, and patriotic Canadians were unwilling that the Dominion should abandon without a struggle its claim to possess the highest summits of the Rocky Mountain system. The question involved other geographical and mountaineering problems of an interesting nature, so that when my friend Dr Norman Collie, F.R.S., asked me last spring to join him in an expedition of exploration and surveying in the Northern Rockies, I gladly accepted the invitation.

Byers (cook), Nigel Vavasour, and Roy Douglas; thirteen horses, three dogs, and a quantity of tents, provisions, and baggage. We took no Swiss guides. Our route lay northwards through a maze of fallen logs and burnt timber up the valley of the Pipestone Creek; and we spent our first night in camp in a hollow on the banks of the stream. It was terribly hot and the mosquitoes were very active, whilst my first dinner-of fat bacon, bannock, and fried onions, washed down by three cups of strong tea-induced symptoms which for a while made me oblivious of the pleasures of camp-life. After two more days of steady travel, we camped in a pretty spot an hour below the summit of the Pipestone Pass. The heat was terrific, and I tried to bathe in the stream; but before I was half undressed a brigade of "bulldogs and mosquitoes mustered, and, attacking me "not in single spies but in battalions," fairly put me to rout. The "bulldog' is a big horse-fly whom Nature has armed with a formidable pair of forceps like scissors, that will

[ocr errors]

sometimes draw blood. The horses suffered terribly We started at the end of from them, and on very hot July from Laggan, a station days I have seen them dripof the C.P.R. in the heart of ping with blood under their the Rockies. The caravan-I attacks. Still, on the whole, beg pardon, "outfit" con- I prefer the "bulldog" to the sisted of our two selves and mosquitoes. The former's nip Mr Herman Woolley; four men may make you swear tempo-W. Peyto (head packer), W. rarily, if audibly, but it leaves

use.

We

no after-irritating effects.
lit "smudges," or fires of damp
grass and weeds, to drive them
off, but they proved of little
At midnight a tremend-
ous thunderstorm broke, with
torrents of rain, and it was
not long before a small stream
trickling over my ground-sheet
showed me that our well-
ventilated teepee or Indian
tent, which had a big hole
at the top, admitted water as
well as air. Next morning
(Wednesday, 3rd August) we
crossed the Pipestone Pass,
8400 feet above the sea. The
scenery here was grand but
desolate. Huge crags, gro
tesque rather than beautiful,
with cliffs nearly 3000 feet in
height, towered on our left.
Northwards we could see
through the mists the twin
summits of Mount Murchison,
and it was evident that the
height of 15,789 feet which
some ancient cartographer,
with a fine parade of accuracy,
assigned to it, and which still
appears in the most up-to-date
maps, is a great exaggeration.
The weather was cloudy, but
it cleared up as the day wore
on, and we had no more rain
for three weeks. From the
head of the pass we descended
into the valley of the Siffleur,
a tributary of the Saskatche-
wan, at first through dense
scrub of dwarf willow, and
then

son group of mountains, and pitched our camp in a pretty basin amid rocky hills. The Siffleur, its waters fed by the melting of the glaciers, had here grown to a good-sized river, and as our horses were all required for the baggage (we had done all the journey hitherto on foot), we had to ford it one by one on Peyto's fine mare, Pet. Byers rode over first, and then Peyto coaxed the mare back; I followed, and the same operation was repeated until we were all safely across. Farther on we found ourselves in a thick forest of tall pines with patches of bad muskeag, or marsh. Many of the trunks were rotten and tottering, and one of the horses had a narrow escape from a tree which he bumped against with his pack, and which fell right across the trail, narrowly missing the animal's haunches. Here and there whole clumps had been blown or burned down, and the logs, piled in wild confusion one on another, formed a tangle that made our progress very slow. However, our heavily laden team, though sinking deep in the boggy ground at every step, went gallantly on, headed by Molly, the old bell - mare, with her little foal trotting at her side. Every few minutes we had once more through the to halt while the men everlasting pine woods. The cutting out the trail. It was trail improved as we advanced, tedious work, for one could do and we did two good days' nothing except sit still on a march. On the Thursday we log and scratch one's mosquito saw on our left across the bites, listening to the tinkling river a fine glacier descending of Molly's bell and the blows from the flanks of the Murchi- of Peyto's axe as they re2 N

VOL. CLXV.—NO. MI.

were

completely wood.

sounded through the wood. It was what the men called a "very mean trail," though in places it was fairly well defined, and now and then we saw the teepee - poles of old Indian camping-grounds. Matters improved when we emerged into the desolate valley of the North Saskatchewan, and the trail turned to the left westwards across miles and miles of barren hills strewed with burned timber. A fine glaciercovered peak, named by Collie Peak Wilson, closed the view up the valley, the foreground being filled in by the windings of the river through picturesque rocky knolls. Down the valley, where the stream turned abruptly to the north, a murky copper-coloured haze hung over the hills, and told of forest-fires raging in the direction of the Peace river. A few miles away we could see the Kootenay Plains, a well-known campingground and market of the Indians in the old days when they traded with the Hudson's Bay Company. We soon reached the Saskatchewan, which owing to the great heat was in tearing flood, and struck an excellent trail up its right or south bank. The word Saskatchewan signifies, I believe, in the Indian language, "The River of Turbid Waters," and the torrent certainly justified its title, as it swept by us like a muddy mill-race 150 to 300 yards in width.

Towards sundown on Saturday evening the wind changed, and the distant smoke-clouds we had observed in the morning came rolling up the valley,

completely obliterating the mountains from view. The air grew suspiciously hot, and as a strong peaty odour assailed our nostrils, our thoughts naturally turned to forest-fires and the chances of our outfit escaping if the valley got ablaze. Woolley humorously announced his intention of going to bed in his boots a prospect which alarmed me considerably more than the fire, for the head of my bed was dangerously near his feet, and Woolley, who was a great footballer in his day, in his dreams seemed sometimes to fancy that he was playing a fine dribbling game with the base of my skull. However, the night passed without any alarms, and in the morning the sun shone in a fairly clear sky. All the same the thought struck me that death seemed to present itself to the backwoods traveller in a charming variety of shapes, if half the stories one heard were to be believed. Apart from the ordinary risks inseparable from climbing on virgin peaks, we seemed to have a fair chance before us of being burned in our beds, starved, slain by falling trees, or drowned while fording rivers.

Sunday was always our unlucky day, and the 7th August formed no exception to the rule. It was tremendously hot, and, as the Saskatchewan was tearing down in bigger flood than ever, the trail along the bank was in many places under water. The horses were continually floundering about in deep holes, and I noticed that they keenly relished their bathes. Suddenly, as we were rounding a

nasty corner where the bank dropped steeply into the torrent, the soft earth gave way under the feet of one of the packhorses, and he fell in up to his neck. Finding the water nice and cool, and that it lightened the load on his back, to our horror he coolly swam out into mid-stream, and, after a desperate struggle with the swift current, reached an island separated from us by a channel thirty yards broad. I should explain that these Indian ponies take to the water like ducks, and directly one of the team is seen swimming the others follow suit and plunge in after him. In Morocco, where I have forded some baddish rivers, the animals required much whacking and objurgation to make them enter the water; but in Canada they simply race each other to get in first, and that traveller is wise who packs his kit in perfectly waterproof bags. Thus it happened that Molly the bell-mare, who was always up to mischief, seeing the fun, took a header in after her companion, and her foal promptly followed its dam. The little creature was turned bodily over by the force of the current, and for a moment I thought it must be drowned; but it soon recovered itself, and, striking out pluckily, reached the island, where it shook itself like a dog and trotted after its mamma. It looked as though we should have the whole outfit swimming, but we managed to grab hold of all the remaining horses except one, who made a bolt

for the water and swam gaily across to the three other culprits; and all four started grazing on the island just as if nothing had happened. The language which ensued fairly beat all records in backwoods profanity, and the smoke vapours fairly thickened with curses. The whole thing would have been excessively comic, had the possible consequences been less serious. The impassive Collie said not a word, but he looked more than usually grave; indeed, the prospect of losing our outfit by fire or water seemed the only thing which disturbed his philosophic calm. Apart from the ruin of the trip, we should have been in a pretty fix without our provisions, and seven days' march from home.

The only way to get the delinquents back was to move on with the rest of the team, which we proceeded to do, pitching camp, however, directly we were out of sight round the corner. In ten minutes Peyto came in, furiously whacking the four dripping animals, and, needless to say, we found our bacon, flour, and sugar in a nice In the afternoon the heat grew worse than ever, while every species of insect abomination mosquitoes, midges, sand-flies, black flies, and bulldogs-buzzed about us, and I awoke from a nap on a mossy bank to find a tribe of ants on the war-path inside my shirt, and busily engaged in striking a trail down my spinal column. The night was not much cooler, and the mosquitoes, who gener

mess.

ally ceased to worry us in bed, allowed us no sleep. Next day we were forced by the floods up into the woods, where there was no trail, and the men had terrible work with the fallen timber. We hoped to reach Bear Creek, the South or Little Fork of the Saskatchewan, that evening. The scenery grew grander and more alpine as we advanced, and several splendid peaks came into view whenever the smoke - haze lifted. The whole country was very like Switzerland in almost every respect, and the resemblance struck me more every day. The chief difference was that out here the firs grew about 500 feet higher, and there appeared to be no alps or upland pastures above the tree-line. We did not reach Bear Creek till seven o'clock. Our campingground was in a magnificent situation at the foot of Mount Murchison, in an amphitheatre of lofty mountains near the junction of the South, Middle (or West), and North Forks. Here, where four valleys, all leading to grand mountain scenery, converge, will probably be the Grindelwald or Chamounix of the Canadian Alps in the time to come, when this beautiful country is better known, and its peaks and glaciers become, as I venture to prophesy they some day will become, the "Playground of America." Of the individual mountains which environed our encampment I shall speak more fully presently.

We spent a day at Bear Creek, as man and beast both required rest, and we had ar

As

ranged to make a cache there of a considerable portion of our provisions and baggage. we expected for the remainder of our journey to be continually fording rivers, our saddle-horses would be required, and it was therefore necessary to materially lighten our equipment. Bear Creek itself, a glacier-fed mountain torrent, sixty yards wide, and the worst and most dangerous of these rivers, had to be forded on the morrow; and, as I watched it rushing and foaming over its rocky bed, I cannot say I relished the prospect. However, Peyto was of opinion that even if you got upset you would probably struggle ashore somehow, unless you knocked your head against a stone,"And then," he added philosophically, "you would die easy."

Early next morning, we mounted our horses for the passage, and had only gone down-stream a few hundred yards when I was appalled to see Peyto trying to ford a place at the head of а rapid run, where the water tumbled and roared amid big stones, and where an upset would have meant certain drowning. Pet, however, wiser than her master, refused to go in above her knees, and we found a much better place lower down, where the stream separated into three channels, and the whole outfit eventually got across without mishap. From here we followed up the main valley, and presently saw on the other side the embouchure of the North Fork, which discharges the meltings of the great snowfields and glaciers

« السابقةمتابعة »