“Devil’s or Devil’s Head Lake. We will drive over there this afternoon, if you like. I think the views you get from that road are the best of the whole park scenery, unless, perhaps, you except the view of Mount Massive and the Main Divide from a boat on the Vermilion Lakes. Now let us go to the other end of the building.”
“Here,” he continued, when we were gathered upon the south-eastern balcony, “you are looking down the line of the Rockies, instead of up their length, as you were before. This is the valley of the Spray, which joins the Bow just below the hotel.”
We could not see the river, but we could hear its rushing, and readily believed our friend’s stories of the trout in its pools. On the left of the valley long slopes of whitish limestone rose bare and glistening with dew far above the forest, until they terminated in two sharply cut peaks, from which fell suddenly away, for many hundreds of feet, the precipices that we had half seen earlier that morning. This was Mount Rundle—an excellent type of the mountains of stratified limestone, shaped like wedges laid upon their sides, in parallel rows north and south, which constitute the eastern half of the Rocky Mountain system in this part of the world. The eastern aspect of all these ranges, therefore, is a rank of precipices—tier upon tier of nearly or quite level ledges of limestone, strongly indicated by banks of snow and lines of trees—broken into separate headlands, and bordered at their base by bush-covered slopes of débris. Here and there a great gap allows you to pass to the rear of these headlands, when you find them sloping back with much regularity into the forest-covered valley, beyond which another rank of cliff-faced promontories again confronts you, and so on until the central water-shed is reached.
“Why does that curious little cloud stay so persistently on the slope of that hill?” asked one of the ladies, pointing to the right.
“That is the steam from the hot springs,” was the reply, “and after breakfast we will walk up there.”
The hot mineral springs at Banff lie along the base of Sulphur Mountain, where they flow from exits round which great masses of tufa have been built up. The upper spring, some 700 feet above the river, commands a wonderful view of “peak o’ertopping peak,” with green vales and broken crags between. From this spring a large stream of sulphurous water, at a warmth of 120° F., is conducted down to the hotel, to supply the luxurious bath-houses. More plebeian arrangements exist at the spring itself for bathing and drinking the waters, which have proved wonderfully efficacious in curing a great variety of diseases, especially obstinate cases of rheumatism and dyspepsia. Two miles distant, up the Bow, are two other prominent springs—one an open basin, and the other a large pool, occupying a dome-shaped cavern built out of its own depositions when it was more copious, and this is now a most curious place. Originally, the only way of reaching the water was by squeezing one’s self through the chimney at the top of the dome and sliding down a slippery ladder, like entering a Tchuckchi house in Siberia. Now a tunnel has been bored through the side of the dome, level with the surface of the diminished water, and you go straight in from your dressing-room in the rustic cottage at the entrance. Another pretty cottage admits to the open pool. In both the pool and the cave the water is pleasantly warm, clear and almost tasteless, though highly impregnated with salts, giving it a close resemblance to the Arkansas Hot Springs. These improvements of the springs, and the good roads throughout the Park, are the work of the Government, which is making easily accessible all the most interesting localities and best points of view.
We could have spent a week in this most delightful spot—rambling, climbing, sketching, shooting (outside the Park limits), fishing and boating. The beautiful river and lakes, and the falls, have hardly been mentioned, even. But time presses, and next morning sees us reluctantly resuming our journey.
MOUNT STEPHEN FROM THE WEST.
From Banff we pushed straight westward through wooded defiles into the upper valley of the Bow, where the scenery is upon an even grander scale. On the left runs a line of magnificent promontories—prodigious piles of ledges studded with square bastions and peaked towers. On the right is a gray sloping wall, 5,000 feet high, of slaty strata tilted on edge, and notched into numberless sharp points and splinters, like the teeth of a badly hacked saw. Between the two, right in the foreground, stands Castle Mountain, isolated, lofty, brown and yellow, vividly contrasting with the remainder of the landscape, and terminating in a ruinous round tower from whose top pennants of mist are waving more than a mile above our heads. As we roll past its base it gradually changes from a lone castle tower to an escarpment of enormous cliffs. These can be climbed, and the expectation of what the outlook would be is more than realized.