OFFICIAL SECTION.
REPORT OF SECRETARY.
The Alpine Club of Canada passed its second birthday on March 28th. The original membership of 79 has increased to 400, of whom eight are honorary, and eleven are associate members. The new honorary members are the Rt. Hon James Bryce, His British Majesty's Ambassador at Washington, and the Rev. James Outram, author of "In the Heart of the Canadian Rockies." One new associate member was added, Mr. Schiller Flindt. The only loss by death came to the honorary list in the decease of Col. Laussedat, the eminent and venerable French scientist.
The constituency of the Club has extended to the Orient and Antipodes: India, Australia, South Africa, Holland and Switzerland and a dozen of the United States are represented in its membership, as well as Britain and all Canada.
The second annual meet was held during the first week in July in Paradise Valley with 150 members and guests in attendance. Owing to the heavy snowfalls of the previous winter and an unusually late spring, the meadow at the head of the valley was too wet for an encampment, and it was necessary to hew out a place in the unbroken forest at the base of Mt. Aberdeen. This involved very considerable though speedy labour: but the trees were felled, the ground prepared, the tents erected and everything made comfortable by the opening day. In spite of bad weather—snow and rain and thunder—climbing began on the day appointed, and there was not one beginner who failed to accomplish one of the official climbs, Mts. Temple and Aberdeen. The total number qualifying for active membership was 66; also a large number of active members climbed these or other peaks every day. The President and his staff of mountaineers considered that the character of the climbing was greatly in advance of that done the previous year. The round ascents were made in less time; physical hardiness was more in evidence; and the camp-fire, that supreme test of good-fellowship, if not of mountaineering-stuff, witnessed no dampened buoyancy in those of the company who had spent the day on glacier and neve and rock. This was the general rule. The excursions, too, over the difficult snow-passes, notably Abbot Pass, were much more strenuous than the excursions from Toho Pass, and, on the whole, the achievements of Paradise Valley Camp showed marked progress in amateur mountaineering.
The photographic exhibition, at which sixty pictures were shown by nine exhibitors, was an interesting feature of the meet. The prizes of a gentleman's and a lady's ice-axes were awarded to the President and to Mr. Bridgland, but all the exhibits reached a high standard of excellence.
