Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS, TAKEN FROM THE ICE WALLS, LOOKING NORTH

It was Roos’ idea that I should swim off, clamber over the side of the barge, lassoo the “near” swan with a piece of pack-rope to represent reins, and let him shoot me as “Lohengrin.” It wouldn’t exactly run into the “continuity” of the “sportsman” picture, he admitted; but he thought that Chester might use it, with a lot of other odds and ends, under some such title as “Queer People in Queer Places.” The idea appealed to me strongly. “Lohengrin’s Farewell” had always moved me strangely; and here was a chance actually to appear in the classic rôle! “You bet I’ll do it,” I assented readily. “What shall I wear?” The “Shining Armour,” which we both seemed to connect with “Lohengrin,” happened to be one of the things not brought up in our saddle-bags that morning. We were in a hot discussion as to the best manner of improvising a helmet and cuirass out of condensed milk and sardine tins, when Nixon, asking if we knew that the sun only shone about three hours a day in that “geesly crack in the hills,” dryly opined that we should take our pictures of the lake while there was plenty of light. That sounded sensible, and we started feverishly to hurry through with the routine grind so as to be free to do proper justice to “Lohengrin.” As Fate would have it, however, that which was presently revealed to me of the ways of fresh-water icebergs quenched effectually my desire to swim off and take liberties with the capricious things at close quarters.

After making a number of scenic shots, Roos announced that he was ready to go ahead with the “falling iceberg” stuff. As it was quite out of the question making our way along the base of the cliffs on either side of the lake to the face of the glacier in the limited time at our disposal, and, moreover, as we had already demonstrated the impossibility of making artificial icebergs with “sixty per” dynamite, it became necessary to improvise something closer at hand. It was Roos’ idea that a piece of cliff cracked off into the lake might produce the effect desired, especially if “cut” with discrimination. “Here’s the way it goes,” he explained. “The cracked off rock plunks down into the lake right into the middle of a bunch of floating icebergs. I starts cranking at the splash, and with the bergs all rolling about and bumping into each other no one can tell but what it was one of them that really started it. Then I’ll pick you up hopping up and down on the bank and registering ‘surprise’ and ‘consternation’; and then follow with a close-up of you standing on that high rock, looking down on the quieting waves with folded arms. Now you register ‘relief’ and finally a sort of ‘awed wonder.’ Then you take a big breath and raise your eyes to the face of the glacier. You keep right on registering ‘awed wonder’ (only more intense) and as I fade you out you shake your head slowly as if the mighty mysteries of Nature were beyond your understanding. Get me? They ought to colour the film for that dark blue in the laboratory (I could tell ’em just the solution to make that ice look cold), and the sub-title ought to be ‘The Birth of an Iceberg,’ and....”

“Jim’s the midwife, is he?” I cut in. “Yes, I get you. Tell him to uncork some of that ‘sixty per’ ‘Twilight Sleep’ of his and I’ll stand by for the christening.”

After a careful technical examination of the terrain, Jim, chief “Powder Monkey,” located what he thought was a favourable spot for operations and started to enlarge a thin crack in the cliff to make it take five sticks of dynamite. That was more than half of our remaining stock; but Roos was insisting on a big iceberg, and plenty of powder was the best way to insure success. It must have been the tamping that was at the bottom of the trouble, for moss and damp earth are hardly solid enough to deflect the kick of the dynamite in the desired direction. At any rate, although there was a roaring detonation, the mighty force released was expended outward rather than inward. The face of the cliff hardly shivered, and only an inconsiderable trickle of broken rocks and sand slid down into the lake. Too sore to take more than hostile notice of Nixon’s somewhat rough and ready little mot about the “‘Birth o’ the Iceberg’ turning out a geesly miscarriage,” Roos clapped the cap over his lens, unscrewed the crank and began taking his camera off its tripod. That rather hasty action was responsible for his missing by a hair what I am certain was the greatest opportunity ever presented to a moving picture operator to film one of the most stupendous of Nature’s manifestations.

The roar of the detonating dynamite reverberated for half a minute or more among the cliffs and peaks, and it was just after the last roll had died out that a renewed rumble caused me to direct a searching gaze to the great wall of ice and snow that towered above the farther end of the lake. For an instant I could not believe my eyes. It could not be possible that the whole mountainside was toppling over! And yet that was decidedly the effect at a first glance. From the rim of the snow-cap down to the back of the glacier—a mile wide and two thousand feet high—there was one solid, unbroken Niagara of glittering, coruscant ice and snow. Like a curtain strung with diamonds and pearls and opals it streamed, while the shower of flaming colours was reflected in the quivering waters of the lake in fluttering scarves of sun-shot scarlet, in tenuous ribbons of lavender, jade and primrose. It was only when the last shreds of this marvellous banner had ceased to stream (at the end of thirty or forty seconds perhaps) that I saw what it was that had caused it. The whole hair-poised brink of the great snow-cap—sharply jolted, doubtless, by the explosion of the dynamite—had cracked away and precipitated itself to the glacier level, nearly half a mile below. The shock to the latter appeared to have had the effect of jarring it sufficiently to crack down great blocks all along its face. The glacier had, in fact, been shocked into giving birth to a whole litter of real icebergs where, nearer at hand, we had failed dismally in our efforts to incubate even an artificial one. As glacial obstetricians it appeared that we still had much to learn.

Roos made a great effort to get his camera set up again in time to make it record something of the wonderful spectacle. He was just too late, however. Only a few thin trickles of snow were streaking the face of the cliff when he finally swung his powerful tele-photo lens upon it, and even these had ceased before he had found his focus. It was no end of a pity. I saw several of the great valangas started by the Austrian and Italian artillery in the Dolomites, and, previous to that, what I had thought were very considerable slides on Aconcagua and Chimborazi, in the Andes, and on Kinchinjunga and among the hanging ice-fields above the Zoji-la in the Himalayas. But any half dozen of the greatest of these would have been lost in that mighty avalanche of ice and snow that we saw descend above the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Nixon, with a lifetime spent in the Selkirks and Rockies, said he had never seen anything to compare with it.

Jim, reporting that he still had three sticks of dynamite in hand, said he reckoned there might be a better chance of starting an “iceberg” on the southern side of the lake than on the northern one, where we had failed to accomplish anything. The southern slope was even more precipitous than the northern, he pointed out, and he had his eye on a rock which looked as if a charge might turn it over and start it rolling. “You never can tell what you may be startin’ among a bunch o’ tiltin’ rocks like them ’uns,” he said hopefully. Nixon’s muttered “That ain’t no geesly hooch dream” might have meant several things; but I took it that he intended to imply that there was too much “unstable equilibrium” along that southern shore to make it the sort of a place that a neurasthenic would seek out for a rest cure. I felt the same way about it, only more so; but Roos’ disappointment over what he had already missed was so keen that neither of us had the heart to interpose any objections when he told Jim to go ahead and see what he could do. As two sticks of dynamite were already promised to Harmon, the trick, if it came off, would have to be pulled with one. Spitting tobacco juice on the taffy-like cylinder for luck, Jim clambered off up the cliff and planted it under his “likely rock,” Roos meantime setting up in a favourable position below.