Behind Wilmer lies a part of the Selkirks which is known only to a few ranchers in the neighbourhood, and is scarcely accessible except from this point. We had spent two days in the neighbourhood of Lake Windermere, and on the third, though each of us was booked to be hundreds of miles further on our way by the end of the week, and heaven only knew how we were even going to reach Golden again, for we had let the rig go back and the boat was reported stuck somewhere on the Columbia River, we neither of us could resist an offer that was made us of an opportunity to climb Iron Top Mountain, which was somewhere at the back of this alluring country.
The offer came from a Mr. Starboard. In Canada you will sometimes find, several hundreds of miles from civilisation, some strenuous and capable man whom you would think civilisation needed and would require. But the wilds in Canada are more important. Mr. Starboard had come to these parts originally as a prospector and miner, but the mine he had come to had shut down—not for lack of silver and lead in it, but for lack of transport facilities; whereupon Mr. Starboard, fascinated by one of these valleys, had started horse-breeding there, occupying what time was left from clearing his land in making roads through the mountains and hunting big game. Dropping in at Mr. Bruce's casually one morning, he asked us if we should like to see the best view he knew of in the Selkirks. We said we should; and each, equipped with a toothbrush and a comb, was driven out to Starboard's ranch for lunch.
Travelling in the remoter parts of Canada gives you strange table companions. You never know quite what company you will meet, though you can generally count upon its being interesting. While we were being driven up the Columbia Valley a few days before, we had heard from various homesteaders that there was 'a big German bug' staying up in the mountains with his friends, trying for bear. 'They call him the Land Crab,' our informant would usually add for further elucidation of the big bug's official position. On arriving at Mr. Starboard's ranch we found that the big bug in question was, in the commoner prose of Europe, the Landgraf of Hesse with two equerries and a small retinue. For a motley collection, the party that sat down to lunch that day in the chief room of Starboard's ranch would be difficult to beat. There was the Landgraf himself and his German companions, a well-known Canadian official, three valets—these all neatly dressed—Mrs. Starboard quite wonderfully frocked, as the fashion papers say, Mr. Starboard in ranching costume, and ourselves who had slept in our clothes for several days. The waiters were a Japanese and a Chinese. We fed off bear, shot by one of the Germans, who had been most successful in their hunting both of bear and goat.
Bear, by the way, was only one among other delicacies. Its taste is rather like that of Christmas beef stewed in the gravy of a goose. Vegetarians would not care about it; but after living on little else for two days I can answer for its being both appetising and sustaining, particularly in high altitudes. After lunch, four of us, Mr. Starboard, the railway man, my friend, and myself started for Iron Top Mountain, which lay seventeen miles off along a trail that rose steeply most of the way. The ponies were excellent ones, better even than the slicker. Mr. Starboard had specially picked them, because he wanted to see if they could be got to carry us to the top of the mountain, a little over ten thousand feet. He had never taken ponies as high before, and doubted if the test had ever been made in Canada, though I fancy ponies have done as much or more in the Himalayas.
We did fourteen miles that afternoon, following at first the bank of a blue foaming stream, then turning eastward up a steeper valley through which a smaller stream flowed. The trail was far better than many roads in French Canada or on the prairie, and had been constructed by Mr. Starboard himself to provide access to a silver and lead mine which had been shut down for some time. It seemed extraordinary that in a country so wild and remote there should be any trail at all, but miners go anywhere. A man who has to find his way into the earth makes no difficulty about finding his way across it.
It was a day, half sunshine and half mist, and the mountains would sometimes be shut entirely in shrouds of vapour, sometimes would reveal slanted white tops cut off in mid-air by the fog below, sometimes would clear altogether, so that one could see everything on them, from the snowslides down which the grizzlies travel to the narrow tracks of the goats. As we mounted, the valley grew steeper and steeper, and the trail wound more and more. We passed one place where, earlier in the year, there had been a terrific slide of snow half a mile in width. The huge firs still lay where they had fallen, shattered and splintered before it. Half-way down, the avalanche had met a great pinnacle of rock that had stood the shock unmoved, and caused the snow to part to left and to right, where it had hewn two lanes of almost equal breadth through the trees. It was just near here that Mr. Starboard showed me a grizzly's track, and told me that he had seen no less than seventeen of these bears in the last fortnight. He said that their numbers were increasing yearly in that neighbourhood. A little later a porcupine crossed the trail ahead of us, and lurched unwieldily into the undergrowth. The trees grew close together all the way, except where we passed a great stretch of mountainside where a forest fire had raged, and even there the scorched trunks still stood, gibbeted skeletons of trees.
We put up for the night in a deserted mining camp, almost a village it was, with wooden shacks likely to be used again when the Kamloops to Golden Railway is completed and it is worth while getting the stuff out of the mine.
Up there it had begun to freeze hard, but a big fire and much bear, which the railway man fried over it with skill, kept us warm enough till we went to bed under many blankets in one of the shacks.
It was bitterly chill—the start in the early morning—after a breakfast of cold bear; and very soon after we set out we got into snow, and the trees ceased, and the ponies' flanks began to heave steadily. The morning was as bright as it was cold, however, and Mount Farnham, shaped like a chimney-pot, glittered right over us on the left. I remarked to Mr. Starboard what a nasty mountain it looked for climbing purposes, whereupon he astonished me by saying he had been up it.
'You went up to see if it could be done?' I said, thinking I had struck a keen climber in the European sense of the word.