CAMPING IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES.* FOR the landscape-lover and the
devotee of camp-life the Rocky Mountains present a vast tract of mountainous country full of almost boundless possibilities. The early explorers like Mackenzie were too intent on going ahead and finding passes, to deviate from the easiest track, the surveyors have not touched the country more than to survey possible railway routes, and finally the work of scientific explorers is discreetly buried as soon as it is produced. On the whole this gives the most pleasure to the greater number. It is better, we think, that a hundred should explore, and each bring in his mite, than that a businesslike surveying expedition should march solemnly through magnificent scenery and label everything beautiful with the most hideous names the unimaginative mind can select. When an individual of ordinary imagination has described some natural feature with an epithet or a name that can be heard without wincing, let the surveyor measure it and put it in its proper place, but not till then. To call a mountain after Colenso or Brown or Jones seems to us sacrilege. An exception may be made for historical names, but they should all give place to the Indian names. The explorer is but renaming his so-called discoveries, and surely it would be only a graceful act to preserve the Indian names; and as we have taken their country, let us at least preserve the memory of those beautiful appellations which are never in bad taste.
Mr. Wilcox's explorations with his companions were mostly in the region round Lake Louise. He says the ordinary tourist stops in the neighbourhood of the Lake but for an hour or so, though for him this beautiful sheet of water had a never-failing attraction. The party made the chalet their base of operations for camping expeditions into the practically unexplored region between the Vermilion Pass on the east and Kicking Horse Pass on the west. We do not defend these names, but at least they have an origin not unconnected with the places themselves, as one alludes to the colour of the soil, and the other commemorates an incident in early explor- ing days. Into the country east of Lake Louise our author plunged with his companions, keenly alive to the beautiful, and at great pains to describe it for us. Less harsh than much of the world's mountain scenery though they are, it must be admitted that the gentlest landscapes of the Rockies belong to a somewhat severe style of beauty. The true alp, the mountain pasture, is rare, though Mr. Wilcox describes in the Saddle such a pasture "where long, rich grass waves in the summer breezes, beautified by mountain flowers, anemones, sky-blue forget-me-note, and scarlet castilleias. Scattered larch-trees make a very park of this place, while the great swelling slopes rise in graceful curves towards the mountain peaks on either side." Mr. Wilcox is writing in August. But the most charming features of these mountain landscapes are the exquisitely coloured lakes, which, seen in the astonishingly clear atmosphere of these regions, are veritable gems set in dark forest belts or " jewelled " to the stern and rocky spurs of the mountains. In the short two months' summer of the mountains an alpine flora does its best to lend warmth to the foregrounds of these cold solitudes, springin■ up beneath the very snow. For even under the brightest sun the colouring of the mountain landscapes never becomes rich. In a very fascinating description of a visit he paid to Lake Louise in the middle of October, the author brings this out clearly. He goes on to say :—
" There is rarely much colour at sunrise or sunset in the mountains. The dry, clear atmosphere has little power to break up the white light into rainbow colours, and to give the brilliancy of colouring to be seen near the sea-coast or in the lowlands. The • Camping in the Canadian Rockies. By Walter Dwight Wilcox. With 25 Fall.page Photogravures and other Illustrations. London : G. P. Patnam's Sons. tints are like the air itself,—pure, cold, and clear. With more truth they might be called delicate shades or colour !suggestions. They recall those exquisite but faint hues seen in topaz or tourmaline, or transparent quartz crystals, wherein the minutest trace of some foreign mineral has developed rare spectrum colours and imprisoned them for ever. Ofttimes the snow of the mountain tops is thus tinted a bright, clear pink, beautifully con- trasted against the intensely blue sky. I have never seen a deep red on the mountains or clouds at these altitudes."
The thunder of the avalanche is rarely absent from the mountains in summer, and the long interval that follows the fall of a distant avalanche before the sound reaches the observer is most impressive. Rock-falls are frequent too,
though they are not, we believe, of that daily regularity that characterises the Himalayas, where the traveller at certain hours in the middle of the day is literally bombarded with boulders. Nor do we hear of the mid-day torrents that sur- prise the traveller in the narrow defiles of the Pamir region. The Rockies, indeed, seldom surpass a height of 12,000 ft.,
and have not the extreme range of temperature natural to the great altitudes of the Himalayas or the Pamirs.
It is the combination of dark-green forest and immense rough-hewn masses of the mountains, almost all without exception showing their horizontal strata marked by the thin lines of snow, that constitute the distinction of the Rockies. They are further distinguished from the Alps, for instance, by the unbroken solitude of the valleys, with their primeval forests and calm lakes. They lack the gentler human associations that add to the contrast between the valleys and the mountains of Switzerland. Even the valley which the party named Paradise has the appearance in the photograph of a wooded valley from which the snow has thawed and left the trees bare. But this is one of the cases where photography having no colour sense is quite incapable of doing justice to the reality. The actual travelling, though tedious when the trail led through timber, or had to be made through timber, had not in itself any very great difficulties. A fair sample of the difficulties is afforded by the account of the camping ex- pedition to the foot of Mount Temple, and the excursions made from that base. All these expeditions, it must be re- membered, were at an average height above sea-level that means a rigorous climate even in the summer, and occasionally the valleys were above the tree-line, which in the Rockies very seldom rises above 7,000 ft. The camp at the base of Mount Temple was 6,900 ft. above sea-level, and in Mr. Wilcox's opinion the tree-line is the best elevation from which to command the scenery. The artist usually prefers the valleys, but the probability is that where the valleys are forests he would perforce have to choose higher ground. The fine photogravures taken by the author certainly justify his opinion.
There is of course no middle distance, nothing between the trees immediately in the foreground and the mountain masses across miles of intervening valley; for in a mountain climate the precious medium known as " atmosphere " is missing. The hard, clear outlines of these Rocky Mountains would seem to be especially 'suited to the accuracy of the photo- graph, and there are three or four perfect reproductions among these plates; yet the conviction is brought home to the landscape student that a photograph would do more justice to an English landscape because it does give the atmospheric value of the one, but fails entirely to give the magnificent blue of the skies and lakes, and the more sober, but no less necessary, tints of summer green and autumnal yellow of the other. The variety of trees in the Rockies is some- what painfully limited—the spruce, the larch, and the pine sum them up—but such as they are they mean everything to the mountain landscape; and yet the photograph brings them out hopelessly dark, a darkness exaggerated by the very sharpness of definition.
Another highly successful expedition made by Mr. Wilcox, who selected the middle of July in the following year, was to Mount Assiniboine, a fine peak, resembling the Matterhorn in appearance, but far surpassing it in natural inaccessibility. The horizontal strata, the peculiarity of the Rockies, are most pronounced; and the succession of "vertical ledges, which completely engirdle the mountain, from below appear to offer a hopeless problem." Moreover, the avalanches are frequent, naturally, owing to its steep slope and this forma- tion, and every storm in summer brings fresh snow. In August of the same year Mr. Wilcox went up into the Waputehk Range, which is that part of the Rockies proper north of the Kicking Horse Pass. As it has greater glaciers and vaster snowfields than any other district south of Alaska, so is it almost unknown. According to the Indians, there is only one pass between the Kicking Horse and the Athabasca, a distance of a hundred miles. The most attractive feature of these mountains, however, is the course of the Bow River and the beauty of the lakes ; the Upper Bow Lake, from its curving banks and trees, its more open distances, and from its not being so hemmed in by mountain masses, furnishing, if a wild, yet a serener, type of beauty than can be found anywhere else in the Rockies. A photograph of the source of the Little Fork of the Saskatchewan reproduces for us the ideal picture of a river's cradle. The water pours out from two caverns in the extremity of the great glacier, and the view down the valley is the noblest mountain landscape in the Rockies: perhaps in America, with its mingling of peaks, glaciers, and lakes. The most striking plate in this volume is the "Storm in the Little Fork Valley," and it is as admirable a storm effect as is the next plate as a rendering of a snowfield, taken, by-the-bye, at a height of more than ten thousand feet. The twenty-five plates represent, we doubt not, a great deal of patience, long-suffering, and anxiety.
This handsome book of Mr. W. D. Wilcox's is really a most delightful introduction to the true Rocky Mountains, which should, we suppose, be called the Summit Range. No one can conceive the vast unexplored regions that still remain in the Summit Range, which possesses a variety of scenery to. suit all tastes. The valleys and canons and forests have not quite the grandeur of the canons and primeval forests of the Selkirks, but then the Selkirka themselves have not such trees as the redwood cedars of California. But for this reason the enthusiast who wishes to see everything had better begin with the eastern range and work westwards and thus see things in natural order. The busy man who has no time for extended or annual wanderings will also find this par- ticular range easier of access and the travelling faster, so. that he will cover more ground in a limited holiday. The climate, moreover, is obviously drier, and his movements are less likely to be curtailed by bad weather; and the fact that his lowest camp is higher than any peak in the British Isles, if he is healthy should be as a draught of champagne. As a matter of fact, this applies generally to the North-West; but few people realise when they are on a prairie that they may be also on a plateau. In conclusion, we should not forget to point out how eminently suited Camping in the Canadian Rockies is for the ordinary individual who desires to see this splendid scenery; the author's companions were by no means mountain experts, yet enjoyed themselves thoroughly. The author is certainly an artist by nature, as, both his pen and camera show, and a pleasant companion withal.
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