A. P. Coleman in “The Canadian Rockies”
If one halts by chance anywhere on a mountain pass, all sorts of thrilling things are going on around. Lovely flowers are opening eagerly to the sun and wind of Spring—in mid August, with September snows just at hand, a whole year’s work of blossom and seed to be accomplished before the ten months’ winter Sleep begins. Bees are tumbling over them intoxicated with honey and the joy of life while it is summer. Even the humming-birds, with jewels on their breasts as if straight from the tropics, are not afraid to skim up the mountain sides, poise over a bunch of white heather, and pass with a flash from flower to flower. The marmots with aldermanic vests are whistling and “making hay while the sun shines,” and one may see their bundles of choice herbs spread on a flat stone to dry, while the little striped gophers are busy too. Time enough to rest in the winter.
Everything full of bustle and haste and of joy, what could be more inspiring than the flowery meadows above tree-line when the warm sun shines in the six weeks of summer! The full splendour and ecstacy of a whole year’s life piled into six weeks after the snow has thawed and before it falls again!
Higher up even the snow itself is alive with the red snow plant and the black glacier flea, like the rest of the world making the most of summer; and as you take your way across the snow to the mountain top, what a wonderful world opens out! How strangely the world has been built, bed after bed of limestone or slate or quartzite, pale grey or pale green or dark red or purple, built into cathedrals or castles, or crumpled like colored cloths from the rag-bag, squeezed together into arches and troughs, into V’s and S’s and M’s ten miles long and two miles high; or else sheets of rock twenty thousand feet thick have been sliced into blocks and tilted up to play leap-frog with one another.
And then the sculpturing that is going on! One is right in the midst of the workshop bustle where mountains are being carved into pinnacles, magnificent cathedral doors that never open, towers that never had a keeper—all being shaped before one’s eyes out of the mighty beds and blocks of limestone and quartzite that were once the sea bottom. You can watch the tools at work, the chisel and gouge, the file and the sandpaper. All the workmen are hard at it this spring morning in August; the quarryman Frost has been busy over night, as you hear from the thunder of big blocks quarried from the cliffs across the valley; there is a dazzling gleam on the moist, polished rock which craftsman Glacier has just handed over to the daylight; and you can watch how recklessly the waterfall is cutting its way down, slicing the great banks of rock with canyons!
It is inspiring to visit the mountains any day in the year, but especially so in the July and August springtime when a fresh start is made, and plants, animals, patient glaciers, hustling torrents, roaring rivers, shining lakes are all hard at work rough hewing or putting finishing touches on an evernew world.
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“From the physical geographer’s point of view, every feature of the Alps has its counterpart somewhere in the Rockies; folds and faults and tilted strata are carved into an infinitude of shapes, including risky peaks and aiguilles; snow and ice are present in every form, smooth and easy or torn with blue crevasses and splintered into daring seracs. There is every variety of stream at work, clear or muddy, gentle or furious, including much larger rivers in much longer valleys than any in the Alps. Small lakes are far more numerous and beautiful. Every element of interest and beauty on the physical side is as well developed somewhere in the Rockies as it is in the Alps but from my own observation I may suggest that often the Alpine mountain group is better posed, the picture better composed from the point of view of the beholder, than in the Rockies. The reason for this is I believe, largely one of area. The comparatively small mass of the Alps is more statuesque and more easily seen from the proper point of view than any part of the Cordilleran region, which sprawls over a hundred thousand square miles. This seeming lack of focus and concentration of dramatic points seems to me the greatest defect of the Rockies as compared with the Alps.
On the other hand, there is a cleanness and virginity, an exquisite loneliness about many of the Rocky Mountain peaks and valleys that has a peculiar charm. There is the feeling of having made a new discovery, of having caught Nature unawares at her work of creation, as one turns off from a scarcely-beaten route into one never trodden at all by the feet of white men; and this experience may be had in a thousand valleys among the Rockies.”
