THE SNOWY SELKIRKS.
"Every side my glance was bent
O'er the grandeur and tlie beauty lavished through the whole ascent.
Ledge by ledge, outbroke new marvels, now minute and now immense:
Earth's most exquisite disclosure, Heaven's own God in evidence."
The Selkirk Mountains have their own lovers to whom no snows are so white as the Selkirk snows and no clouds so radiant, no forests so darkly beautifully green. There the cedar, hemlock, fir, spruce, grow together in the rich valleys, climbing in serried ranks to meet the blue ice, softening every sharp outline to a gentle undulation. There hang myriads of glaciers festooning the high mountain walls, and there the curved mounds and cornices of driven snow beautify the harsh mountain-faces. And there, if the pilgrim only travel far enough, whole .summits are white against the blue sky, grey rock scarcely showing above the green forest. For, from the Railway and the hotel, you see but a strip of the Selkirks. It is the place to absorb the phenomena of alpine beauty in forest and snow; the place to study the phenomena of alpine structures and alpine vegetation. Nor is that rainbow-edged phenomenon, the "Spectre of the Brocken" wanting.
It is not that the Selkirks are really more beautiful than the Rockies; it is only that they are differently beautiful. In all mountain ranges, the human association counts for much, and that was a true word of Sir Leslie Stephen's who said that the mountains retain every pure and tender emotion once associated with them. It is as true of mountains as of human landmarks in populous places of the earth. And I .suppose this is how the Selkirks keep the first place in the hearts of those who know them well.
Though mountaineering as a sport began in the Selkirks some years before the now popular climbing regions of the Rockies began to be exploited, of late years the public hears less of these ranges so lavishly clad with forest and so heavily weighted with ice, and more of those barer but very beautiful regions about Lakes Louise, Moraine, and O'Hara—more about the Yoho Valley and the Waputehk Snowfields. In truth these splendid ranges lying beyond the Asulkan and Illecillewaet Neves exploited in the late eighties and I early nineties and afterwards surveyed and mapped by Mr. Wheeler, have been very little climbed. It seems as though the Railway Company has encouraged travellers to tarry or even to halt at the centres in the Rockies rather than at Glacier House. There should be no rivalry, say between two such strategic mountain places as Lake Louise and Glacier. Each has its own superb alpine charms; each provides sumptuous climbing. (Dear tourist, the adjective belongs solely to the mountains.) Had both Government and Railway Company spent as much money on roads and accommodation at Glacier as at Lake Louise; and had the attractions of the Selkirks been emphasized proportionately, it might have been that Glacier House to-day were as large as the Chalet at Lake Louise. Manv travellers leaving but a day at the end of the 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.
The diamond-hitch which, they say, had its origin in Mexico over a century ago, is an essential quantity in a packer's education. In the early days of outfitting, as much as $100 has been paid to learn the trick. Certainly necessity was its mother. It is a wonder the Arabs never contrived some such occult process instead of packing the camels by winding thongs about the body and over the pack, at the journey's end cutting all loose. The diamond-hitch is a combination of loops and turns and pulls of the rope which fastens the pack to the saddle, and is so constructed as to hold it firmly and comfortably in place through the day's march and, by a dexterous turn or two of the packer's knowing fingers, to loosen and set free the pack at night. Under the diamond-shaped figure made by the rope when completed, nothing can dislodge the pack. Bronchos have rolled down precipices or have fallen inversely into deep torrents, emerging with the pack precisely in its place and resuming a broncho's wonted philosophic complacence. In his famous and delightful "Travels with a Donkey," Stevenson, searching for health in the mountains of Cevennes, had been spared much trouble and chagrin, had he known this western trick, and there would have been no complaint about holding his pack upon a pack-saddle "against a gale out of the freezing north." If only, as I said, that beloved vagabond fighting insidious and determined death, had been ordered west instead of south. Then we still had had his brave and beautiful essay "Ordered South," but with a different title.
Now that the Alpine Club has given such an impetus to mountaineering in Canada, the Selkirk Mountains will receive increasing attention; and that unmeasured and practically unknown field which borders the Windermere country, where glaciers and excellent waggon-roads almost meet, promises unrivalled sport for the climber whose holidays are short, to whom easy access is a grateful feature. It is through these hard working Canadians that mountaineering may become a national sport, that is, a sport for the many and not for the few only. The utilitarian uses of mountains are obvious; without them there is no growing of wheat on the prairie. Their aesthetic and ethical uses are obvious also—to those who climb them or tarry in their recesses. As the sea to the swimmer so is the mountain to the climber, and a passion for high altitudes has indubitably a moral quality. The day has gone by when ridicule was the climber's portion, albeit it never greatly disturbed him. His apologetic was to go on climbing. To be sure, in the Swiss Alps the loss of life has been enormous, notably after the revival of mountaineering in the late seventies, accounted almost wholly to foolhardiness and guideless climbing. In the Rocky Mountains it has not been so. For, in the twenty-five years of climbing, only three tragedies have occurred, one being in the Selkirks. With intelligence and care and the employment of capable and trusty guides, a novice is as safe on glacier or cliff as on our congested city streets.
Much has been written about the advantages and the joys of mountaineering, but the great inducement is, more than all other inducements, the unimaginable visions that unfold before the climber as he climbs. No man (and the word includes woman) can climb above these forests and over these glaciers, measuring these peaks with their own footsteps, without becoming thrall to the snowy Selkirks.