“But you must not forget,” he said gently, with just the shadow of a smile softening the line of his firm lips, “that Lewis and Clark had something to lose besides their lives—that they had irreplaceable records in their care, and much work still to do. It was their duty to take as few chances as possible. But they never let the risk stop them when there wasn’t any safer way. When you are pulling through Celilo Canal a few days from now, and being eased down a hundred feet in the locks, just remember that Lewis and Clark put their whole outfit down the Tumwater and Five-Mile Rapids of the Dalles, in either of which that skiff of yours would be sucked under in half a minute.”

Bulking insignificantly as an achievement as does my trip in comparison with the many Columbia voyages, recorded and unrecorded, of early days, it still seems to me that the opportunity I had for a comprehensive survey of this grandest scenically of all the world’s great rivers gives me warrant for attempting to set down something of what I saw and experienced during those stirring weeks that intervened between that breathless moment when I let the whole stream of the Columbia trickle down my back in a glacial ice-cave in the high Selkirks, and that showery end-of-the-afternoon when I pushed out into tide-water at the foot of the Cascades.

It is scant enough justice that the most gifted of pens can do to Nature in endeavouring to picture in words the grandest of her manifestations, and my own quill, albeit it glides not untrippingly in writing of lighter things, is never so inclined to halt and sputter as when I try to drive it to its task of registering in black scrawls on white paper something of what the sight of a soaring mountain peak, the depth of a black gorge with a white stream roaring at the bottom, or the morning mists rising from a silently flowing river have registered on the sensitized sheets of my memory. Superlative in grandeur to the last degree as are the mountains, glaciers, gorges, waterfalls, cascades and cliffs of the Columbia, it is to my photographs rather than my pen that I trust to convey something of their real message.

If I can, however, pass on to my readers some suggestion of the keenness of my own enjoyment of what I experienced on the Columbia—of the sheer joie de vivre that is the lot of the man who rides the running road; it will have not been in vain that I have cramped my fingers and bent my back above a desk during several weeks of the best part of the California year. Robert Service has written something about

“Doing things just for the doing, Letting babblers tell the story....”

Shall I need to confess to my readers that the one cloud on the seaward horizon during all of my voyage down the Columbia was brooding there as a consequence of the presentiment that, sooner or later, I should have to do my own babbling?

Pasadena, July, 1921.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction[ vi]
I.Preparing for the Big Bend[1]
II.Up Horse Thief Creek[ 20]
III.At the Glacier[ 48]
IV.The Lake of the Hanging Glaciers[ 63]
V.Canal Flats to Beavermouth[ 77]
VI.Through Surprise Rapids[ 92]
VII.Kinbasket Lake and Rapids[134]
VIII.Boat Encampment to Revelstoke[160]
IX.Revelstoke to the Spokane[192]
X.Rafting Through Hell Gate[ 235]
XI.By Launch Through Box Canyon[ 267]
XII.Chelan to Pasco[ 286]
XIII.Pasco to the Dalles[ 323]
XIV.The Home Stretch[360]