The Alpine Club of Canada has made excursions to these places, and of one quest on Berg Lake a member writes:
"... I shall not soon forget that first day when we came up the trail and, looking through as far as the eye could reach, saw countless blossoms—brilliant crimson Indian paintbrush, pale pink columbines, and mauve asters, their stems imbedded in the softest and greenest of foliage and moss; nor another day, when on the side of Rearguard, we came upon a garden of blue forget-me-nots.... Whilst we lingered amongst the flowers that first day, an avalanche crashed into the lake and the big waves came rolling across until they reached the shore above which we were standing, while broken ice floated out as miniature icebergs upon the milky blue surface of the lake. And Lake Adolphus, across the Pass—I could not find a word to describe its indescribable blue. Seen from camp or through the trees from the side of Mount Mumm, it was absolutely lovely. Then there was the Robson Glacier, in plain view of camp and only a few minutes' walk distant, a never-ending source of interest, with its ice cave and its seracs and crevasses."
As the train sweeps on the tourist sees, from his comfortable seat on the platform of the observation car, a myriad rocky pinnacles silhouetted against the heavens. The peerless grandeur of these peaks, snow-crowned and glistening with glaciers; of emerald lakes at the foot mirroring overhanging crags; of unmeasured wastes of windswept snow-fields; of ethereal solitudes and depths unfathomed, in the wild gorges, where, for all the eternities, only the stars have looked down; and the isolated grandeur of Mount Robson itself lifting its glittering summit into the skies—all this amazing wonder enters with new force and richness into life itself. Half a century ago Milton and Cheadle christened it "a Giant among Giants, Immeasurably Supreme." The first ascent of Mount Robson was made only as recently as in 1909 by the Rev. George Kinney and Mr. Donald Phillips, their final success being the outcome of a trial of twenty days, during which they were continually baffled and driven back by adverse and seemingly impossible conditions. But the difference between success and failure may be accurately defined as persistence of energy. He who gives up, fails; he who does not give up, succeeds. It is only a question of time and of tenacity of purpose. Two unsuccessful attempts to ascend to the summit of Mount Robson had been made in 1907-8. There is a trail leading to the north side of Mount Robson, along the Grand Fork River, skirting the shore of Lake Helena and up through the Valley of a Thousand Falls, with the celebrated Emperor Falls within view, and thus on to Berg Lake and to Robson Pass. The trip to Berg Lake can be made within one day, and it is an excursion into regions of such marvellous beauty that can never be translated into words. In all this bewildering sublimity the spellbound gazer can only question, with Robert Service:
"Have you seen God in His splendours? heard the text that
Nature renders?"
Such fantasies of combination, too, as meet the eye: castles, towers, fortresses, that glow like opal and ruby and topaz; walls of sheer glaciers rising in dazzling whiteness like a spectral caravan; formless solitudes fit only for the abode of the gods! The spirit of the mountains is abroad on her revels; ice peaks 10,000 feet in the upper air are her toys; the winds are her Æolian harp; the Valley of a Thousand Falls is her theatre for pastime. Neither the Swiss Alps, nor yet that mysterious chain of the Tyrol, haunted by drifting cloudshapes and vocal with rushing waterfalls, can compare with the colossal scale of this splendour of all the Mount Robson region. It is the encountering of an entirely new range of experiences. It is Service again who interprets one's emotional enthusiasms in the stanzas:
"Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing else
to gaze on?
Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets
blazon,
Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?
Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream
streaking through it,
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God's sake go
and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.
"Have you known the Great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed
twig a-quiver?
(Eternal truths that shame our soothing lies),
Have you broken trail on snow-shoes? mushed your huskies up
the river,
Dared the unknown, led the way, and clutched the prize?"
Strangest of all, in these stern mountain solitudes, with their glittering crevasses of ice, there are sheltered valleys all aglow with myriads of flowers in brilliant and gorgeous hues; and here, at sunset, peaks touched to gold and crimson are seen looming up in the transparent air against a background of intensely blue sky, a spectacle to inspire both painter and poet with its unearthly beauty.
To traverse such a region as this amid the luxury of the appointments of the Grand Trunk Pacific's transcontinental trains seems at first an anomaly; nothing is primitive save the forests primeval; nothing wild but the scenery. It is all a new universe, somewhere between the once familiar earth and the dream of Paradise—something by which to set the compass of life to a new polarity.
An intrepid mountain climber, Miss Mary L. Jobe, F.R.G.S., made a wonderful quest into these Canadian Rockies recently, and explored a region 100 miles north-west of Mount Robson. Of one scene there Miss Jobe writes: