ogist. Fairmont is the nearest base for an excursion to Columbia Lake.
Dutch Creek is the most southerly of the more important valleys running up into the hills from the Columbia. It is given over to the rancher, the hunter and the angler. A well-known horse-ranch, owned and operated by Captain Thorold, is situated some eight miles from the road leading up the valley, half this distance having a waggonroad and the remainder a bridle trail, thus keeping intact a certain romantic remoteness. Dutch Creek runs through one of the best deer forests in that upper country and provides excellent fishing in season.
Fairmont: North of Windermere, the best known spot on the Rocky Mountains side of the Columbia is Fairmont Hotel Springs, long known locally and to the world outside as Brewer's StoppingPlace, a wayside inn where the traveller was served in homely fashion and with the old-fashioned sense of obligation. Many a motley group has foregathered around the long supper table in Brewer's hospitable kitchen. Right by the door a clear cold pebbly stream runs singing from the mountains. Half a mile by trail up the mountain-side is the hot sulphur spring where baths may be had for the mere taking. A primitive shelter of spruce branches is over the pool protecting the bather. The inn has changed hands and is now owned by a young Englishman who has accommodation for a limited number of guests at $2.00 a day. Persons seeking accommodation for a week or more should write to Mr. A. Hankey, Fairmont, B.C.
Fairmont is 40 miles by the road from Fort Steele south, and 13 miles from Windermere north—in the dry season 13 dusty miles—through picturesque farming lands. The inn, a commodious log house, is situated in a fair ground, the fairest in all the main valley of the Upper Columbia. It is likely to develop into a '"Hydro" for the baths. Here is an ideal situation for the country seat of a nobleman with an agrarian tenantry, with house-parties for the hunting and fishing. In the recesses of the Rockies immediately behind the house are the deer and the goat and the big-horn and the grouse; and the Selkirks with more game are across the river. The fish are in nearly all the streams. Everywhere, in the valley and on the edge of the foothills, there is grazing for the cattle. Here too, the nearer mountains rise more abruptly and to a higher altitude, providing first-rate rock-climbing for one-day's outing. Some of the peaks are, at a venture, placed at 10,000 feet.
Findlay Creek figures conspicuously in the eighties for its mining properties. About that time an English lady, who afterwards put her experiences in a book, "Impressions of a Tenderfoot," spent some time there in a cabin with a companion while her husband was shooting in the neighbourhood. Going up the Columbia she was the only lady among the group of miners, prospectors and surveyors on the steamer. She tells how four men each had washed out $14,000 worth of gold in three months; and how another made $250,000 in seven weeks and proceeded to San Francisco to dissipate it as speedily as possible. Now, as then, there is good fishing in the creek; now, as then, deer are running in the forests; but the mining places are given over mainly to horse-ranching. Findlay Creek got its name from
