holiday for Glacier have regretted that they had not known about the extreme beauty of the piaoe and so had arranged for a longer visit. Verily, a season's round in the Canadian Alps is incomplete without a proportionate visit to the Selkirks and concomitant climbing—if the visitor be a climber.
Hitherto there has been no driveway, though several excellent trails for walking; but a beginning is made in the carriage road up the Cougar Valley. And, ere many years pass, roads will doubtless be built up Rogers Pass and Bear Creek. Indeed, my prophetic eyes see a roadway up the long beautiful Beaver Valley with here and there a comfortable little Chalet, where now (1911) the outfitter would be grateful for a decent pony-trail.
For multitudes are coming to this alpine playground within the great arc of the Columbia River. This trail of the Beaver Valley will be rebuilt; and many an old trail, blazed by the prospector and woodsman and long since abandoned, will again respond to the human foot and the tread of the pack-train. When the Selkirk jungle is cleared away from the narrow path, the newcomer, albeit a common-place globe-trotter and quite inferior in interest and picturesqueness to those earlier, ruder treaders of the trail whose goal was some fabulous eldorado, will be travelling that hidden way for pleasure only. May the day never come in the Selkirks when the pack-train will cease; and the guide of the valleys be driven to earn his bread in less picturesque, less romantic, less hospitable ways; and the diamond-hitch fade to a tradition. A day of such travel in the cool penetralia of these almost tropical forests is better than a thousand by luxurious utilitarian ways of transit. To a healthy soul, its very discomforts are enjoyable and preferable to the conveniences of the private car.
Happily there still remains at Glacier House an outfitter whom to travel with is an education—S. H. Baker, F.R.G.S., a well-learned man who has been about the world a good deal and settled in the Selkirks because he liked life in the forest. In the Rockies there was once a choice group of packers and guides of the lower altitudes, good hunters and horsemen. And they were a real asset to the mountain country. Had Robert Louis Stevenson but once found his way to the heart of the Canadian Rockies, perhaps he had been alive to-day. Certainly he had found company to his taste on the trail and around the camp-fire among the men in fringed buckskin. And Rocky Mountain literature had been richer this day. I am very sure he had made friends with "Fritz"—that splendid dog who climbed a dozen high peaks and was killed by a glacier at last—and had placed him in letters with his peers, Rab and Stickeen. Open-hearted, manly fellows with a strong, silent love of the mountains, these outfitters were; rough, not rude, full of yarns and dry humour, and with a fine sense of that highland hospitality than which Burns wanted none better in heaven. Their patrons were their guests; there was no touch of servility in their service, but there was civility and responsibility and goodwill; and when the foldskirts of the tent were fastened at night, the sleepers fell to sleep with a pleasant sense of security and camaraderie. But the time came when nearly all of these fine fellows were driven far north to other fields, or driven out of business altogether: and it is a distinct loss.
