Our iron horse pants along a rushing river cutting with foaming torrent through chasms so narrow that the father of our land could have leaped across them in the spring-tide of his manhood. Up, up we climb, twenty-eight hundred feet in less than fifty miles. The river along which we climb is always lashing itself into creamy foam; now in rushing rapids, then in a succession of leaps one after the other, as if in mad frolic; now almost throwing its spray into our faces; then two or three hundred feet down in rocky canyons, and at one place through a notched and jagged cleft in the rock, over two hundred feet deep, and only twenty-five feet wide at the top. This is the Albert Canyon. Mountains tower over us, pile upon pile, thickly tree clad below, but to a larger extent gray with lofty trunks all dead and bare from forest fires. I do not know but these fires have been a friend to the tourist. For his vision is widened.
When I was there three years since, there had been in the Selkirks but few destructive fires. The forests were so dense that we often lost fine bits of view, which are now free to us. We look aloft and see great snow-fields, glimmering through openings between the mountains nearest us. We put our glasses up and catch the green tints in furrowed snow masses which tell us we are looking at glaciers. Up! up! The mountains become higher and the precipices bolder and the torrent at our feet more fierce and foaming. We halt for a moment at Illecillewact, said to be a rich mining camp. Far over us thousands of feet, on the side of the mountain, so steep that it seems to us a sheer precipice, we see what looks like a mere burrow for a wild animal. Men are delving through it in quest of silver ore.
After a while we see what appears to be another railroad coming down the mountain side parallel to ours, and a couple of hundred feet above us. A wise one smiles and tells us it is our own road which here makes a letter "S"—a loop almost doubling upon itself, and a large part of it on winding trestles. The trestles creak and groan beneath us, but we bend around and back upon them, and soon our whistle screams. A quick turn around a spur reveals a frozen stream bending over a lofty mountain brow, like a curtain of white with irregular streaks of pale green, and sending its foot almost down to our level. But bend your head back. Far up over us is Sir Donald piercing the sky; a sharp pointed three-faced rock lifting over 11,500 feet, under whose shadow we will halt at Glacier House, over 4,000 feet above the sea, while the pointed peak above us, all rock, stands about a mile and a half higher and so close that one would think a man on its pinnacle could almost throw a stone to the platform on which stands the pretty hotel.
We stop a day here. I spent three or four days there three years ago and would never pass it without a few hours' pause. Few spots on earth afford a sublimer picture than is seen from Glacier House in the Selkirks. It is a vast auditorium; stage and audience-hall, not a half mile wide, with lofty mountains stretching along either side six or seven miles—all covered by noble trees below and snow sheeted above. Sir Donald cold and rocky, is on one side, glaciered heights on the other.
HEMMED IN BY ROCKY HEIGHTS.
A mighty glacier hangs down like a snowy drop curtain over the rear of the auditorium, while a straight line of mountain heights encloses the stage. This line is jagged and toothed on its crest, with lofty glaciers glistening under the pinnacles. Sitting on the platform in front of the pretty station hotel just before sunset, watching the sunlight climb the rocky heights eastward, while those to the west were sinking into grayness, and then a little later as the daylight dodges into twilight and all becomes first a mellow gray, cold and repellent, except over the snow, which seems to emit a light all its own—sitting thus one sees a picture equaled in few spots of the world.
The entire scene is enclosed by mountains, as in a great oblong pit with corners rounded off, no outlet being apparent. The mountains seem to close in upon the glorious picture. It should be seen just before and after sunset and until the lessening twilight is swallowed up, and then in the morning, when the grayness high above seems crystallized. The very light encircling the peaks seem frozen until a sun ray kisses Sir Donald's peak. The cold rocks then catch a yellow glow and the snows below ere long are tinted with pink. Three years ago I looked at it morning and evening for three or four days, and on this trip one morning and evening.
A short run brings the Eastward bound traveler to Rogers pass, one of the ruggedest ever traversed by railroad. Lofty rocky mountains are all around with cold glaciers hanging near their crests.
The drop down to the eastward from the summit of the Selkirk Mountains to the western edge of the Rockies is all the way grand. We again cross the Columbia, which runs north skirting the Selkirk range, and flows again southward past the point crossed by us two days before and seventy miles back but a hundred and twenty five around. Then for some miles we look upon these two mighty ranges, one on our right and the other on our left. Both are lofty, broken, and pinnacled, and snow clothes many summits of each, yet they are strangely unlike each other—as much so as if belonging to widely distant regions.
As we ran up the Columbia the day grew hot, until at Golden it was absolutely sweltering. We had felt nothing like it for nearly a month. We were glad to quit the Columbia and enter a mighty gorge cooled by the sprays from the Kicking Horse, a wildly rushing river coming down from the summit of the Rockies. Up this foaming torrent, between lofty mountains, along gorges barely wide enough to permit the river to leap between, the road cuts its way in galleries of rocks; through tunnels now on one side of the river, then on the other, and enters and winds high up a broad valley between great mountains stretching north and south. It would seem the climb was ended, but not so. We have to take some fifteen or more miles among the loftiest mountains of the great backbone of the continent, looking up ever at gray rocks piercing the sky 6,000 to 8,000 feet almost sheer over us; looking down into narrow valleys or rather gorges 1,000 and 2,000 feet below us. Almost overwhelmed by nature's grandeur, we climb, while a great engine puffs and groans before us, and another pants and wheezes pushing behind. Even with these two great iron horses, tugging behind and before, we make not much more speed than a rapid pedestrian could walk were he on the level. We are climbing a grade of about 200 feet in the mile.