ICE BRIDGE ON ILLECILLEWAET GLACIER
Though there are higher mountains in the Rockies of the United States, they rise from a dry and lofty tableland and most of them have little snow and no glaciers. But for the row of extinct volcanoes beginning with Mt. Baker, Mt. Rainier and Mt. Shasta, the United States has very little truly alpine scenery except where our Rocky mountain ranges extend for a degree or two south of the boundary. A great many of the mountain climbers of the eastern states come to Alberta or British Columbia when they want to use an ice axe or a glacier rope and most of their experienced climbers are members of the Alpine Club of Canada.
Canadians themselves are often not aware of the splendid scenery and the unsurpassed opportunities for climbing of all grades of difficulty offered by their own mountains. There is no more exhilarating sport than that of the mountaineer, and there is no more interesting region for the geologist, the botanist or the zoologist than the grand ranges of mountains that run parallel to the Pacific in our western territory. While tourists from all over the world are being attracted more and more to our glorious alpine region it is especially important that our own people should seek a delightful holiday and gain health and vigor in our mountain parks. As good roads and trails and cabins for shelter are extended to the wilder and more impressive parts of the mountains it becomes easier for the ordinary visitor to study the sublimities of valleys, glaciers and mountain peaks once out of reach without an expensive camp equipment.
A few good Swiss guides are available at the more important centres in the mountains and the inexperienced climber should not undertake any difficult glacier work nor bad rock climbing without the aid of a guide. There is of course a wide range of less difficult walks and climbs that brings one without risk into the heart of the mountains where one may study the ways by which snowfields and glaciers and glacial rivers do their work of shaping the mountains.
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.