XI
AFIELD IN JASPER
HITHERTO we have been wandering about what may be called the Southern Group of the Canadian National Parks, along the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. There remain two parks, Jasper and Robson, lying on either side of Yellowhead Pass, famous in the annals of the fur-trade as Tête Jaune. Through both run the lines of the new transcontinental railways, the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern, on their way to the Pacific coast. These two parks may for convenience be called the Northern Group, although only one is strictly speaking a national park, Robson being under the jurisdiction of the Provincial Government of British Columbia. Tête Jaune Pass and Tête Jaune Cache are said to commemorate the personality of a veteran Indian trader or trapper whose yellow hair made him conspicuous in a country where black was the prevailing hue. Jasper Park is named after a famous trader of the North West Company, Jasper Hawes, the site of whose trading fort may still be seen on the banks of the Athabaska, though every vestige of the buildings has long since disappeared. Jasper House, as it was called, was still standing when Milton and Cheadle went through the mountains in 1862. They describe it as "a neat white building, surrounded by a low palisade, standing in a perfect garden of wild flowers, backed by dark green pines which clustered thickly round the bases of the hills." Ten years later, when Sandford Fleming examined the pass as a possible route for the Canadian Pacific Railway, the post had been abandoned and the buildings were falling into decay. A mile or two east of Jasper, the headquarters of the park, one is shown a grassy mound which represents all that remains of another old trading post, Henry House. Here two routes through the mountains forked, one leading up to Yellowhead Pass, and the other to Athabaska Pass.
| R. C. W. Lett JASPER LAKE |
The peculiar charm of Jasper Park, and of its sister reservation on the western side of the Pass, is in the fact that it is almost virgin ground. As a Park it is very young indeed, and there has not yet been time to improve upon nature. Lest this should suggest a touch of sarcasm, let us admit at once that nature can be improved upon when the improvement takes the form of practicable trails into the heart of the mountains, and the opening of such trails is one of the principal objects of the Canadian Parks authorities. Nevertheless, however one may appreciate the convenience of a good trail, there is a joy unspeakable to the natural man in getting out into the wilderness, if possible where no man has been before, but at least where nothing exists to remind him of the noisy civilisation he has managed to escape from for a time. And that is what you will find in Jasper Park: no automobiles, no stage coaches, no luxurious hotels, no newspapers, no luxuries of any kind, and very few conveniences; but a sufficiency of plain food, the intoxicating air of the mountains to eat it in, and the mountains themselves ever about and above you. What more could a tired man ask? What more could any man ask?
At least so two eastern city men thought as they awoke one glorious August morning to find their train crossing the eastern boundary of Jasper Park, with Brulé Lake sparkling ahead and the curious outlines of Folding Mountain dominating the landscape to the south. At a little station called Pocahontas, a few miles beyond the western end of the lake, they were dumped off unceremoniously with their luggage, and welcomed by a stalwart park officer who had rashly undertaken to look after them for the next few days, and particularly to pilot them out to the Miette hot springs. While he trotted off to round up his ponies, the two "tenderfeet" had leisure to look about them.
Pocahontas, what there is of it, nestles at the foot of Roche Miette, a great frowning bastion of rock dropping sheer for nearly a thousand feet toward the waters of the Athabaska. They tell you in the mountains that it was named after a trapper who managed to clamber up its precipitous sides many years ago, perhaps in chase of a mountain goat, and sat himself down on the extreme edge with his feet dangling over the thousand foot drop. No doubt the situation afforded him the same satisfaction that is experienced by those praiseworthy citizens whose names one sees carved on the extreme end of a log overhanging the Horseshoe Falls at Niagara. Posterity has rather a rude name for such heroes.
A short walk from Pocahontas brings you to a view of one of the most charming waterfalls in this part of the mountains. The erosion of ages has here carved out of the face of the cliff a lofty, semi-circular alcove, and over this background of sombre rock drops a ribbon of sparkling diamonds. An illustration might give some idea of the scene, but could not do justice to the peculiar grace and animation of the fall as seen under a bright sun and swayed gently by a summer's breeze. There are a number of beautiful waterfalls in Jasper Park, such as those on Stony River, a tributary of the Athabaska some distance above Pocahontas, in the Maligne Canyon, of which something will be said later, on the south side of Pyramid Mountain, and on Sulphur Creek above the hot springs, but none that cling to the memory like that of the Punch Bowl.