But we must not forget in the grandeur of the Castle the splendid peaks fronting the valley on the left—Pilot, a leaning pyramid poised high upon a pedestal of square-cut ledges; next to it the more massive summit of Copper Mountain, to which you may almost ride on horseback along an old road cut to the copper mines near its apex; then the green gap of Vermilion Pass (into the Kootenay Valley), through whose opening we catch alluring glimpses of many a haughty spire and bristling ice-crown along the Continental Divide. To the north of this gap stretches Mount Temple’s rugged wall, and beyond it, supreme over all, Lefroy’s lonely peak—loftiest and most majestic of them all.
When Castle Mountain and the steel-pointed sierra behind it have swerved to the right, we see northward the great glacier that nourishes the childhood of the Bow with milky meltings, and in the midst of a galaxy of hoary peaks the noble form of Mount Hector—a monument to the first explorer of Kickinghorse Pass. Then, leaving the Bow, we climb the gorge of a little creek and enter the jaws of a narrow gap through the central range. Upon either hand rise rugged walls crowned with Alpine peaks, framing a chaos of snow-fields, glaciers, and sharp black summits westward—some close by, and showing the scars of ages of battle with eternal winter; others calm and blue in the far distance. Yet here in the pass it is warm and pleasant: trees flourish, flowers bloom, cataracts leap and flash in the sunlight. Backward we review in profile the line of mountains we have passed; beside us are the crumbling terraces and turrets of the Cathedral, thousands of feet straight upward; ahead, reflected in a lake whose waters flow east to the Atlantic and west to the Pacific, the stately head of Mount Stephen, brandishing cloud standards and carrying with royal dignity its ermine mantle of snow and gleaming coronet of ice.
THE SELKIRK PEAKS.
We have pierced the Rockies and are looking down the Pacific slope. Range after range of blue-and-white crests, rising from valleys of forest and prairie, burst upon our awed vision. The scene is past adequate description; we do not say much about it to one another, but only look; and when the descent has been accomplished, and some hours later we halt on the bank of the Columbia (only 100 miles from its source), we are almost stunned with the sublime panorama that has been unrolled so rapidly before our eyes, each scene more astonishing in its magnitude and beauty than the last.
Yet we have crossed only one of the three great subdivisions of the Canadian Rockies. Just ahead lie the Selkirks, and beyond that is the Gold Range. Then we shall cross a wide, hilly plateau region. Finally we must follow the Fraser River in its profound cutting through the Cascades range, before we see the coast of the Pacific. The whole distance from the eastern base of the Rockies to the coast—Banff to Vancouver—is done in thirty-six hours, and the night travel comes where there is little loss of fine scenery; but it is too much to take in at once. Our stop of only one day at Banff was not only a rest, but allowed us to become acquainted with the mountains and prepared us for what we should see ahead; and we mean to stop again at the summit of the Selkirks.
The ascent of the Selkirk range from the east is begun in a regular gateway, where the Beaver River pitches down some rocky stairs at the bottom of a chasm, and is continued along the forested side of its valley, gradually ascending until the track is a thousand feet above the stream. Here the splendor of the Selkirks is manifest in the west, where a rank of stately mountains, side by side and loaded with snow, are grandly outlined. Then we turn up a branch cañon and enter Roger’s Pass through the terrific cleft between Mount Carroll and The Hermit.
In another place[2] the present writer has described his first impressions of these singularly impressive heights—the climax of the transcontinental trip.
At the western extremity of Roger’s Pass lies the Great Glacier, where the Company has built a beautiful little hotel, within twenty minutes’ walk of the ice. It would have been nothing short of criminal to have gone past this point without stopping.
The path through the forest, the huge size of whose trees, and the redundancy of whose mossy undergrowth, bespeak our nearness to the warm coast, is along a brawling river gushing from underneath the glacier. Presently the vast slope of creeping ice is before us, completely filling the head of the gorge. All the glaciers we have hitherto seen were near the very crest of the range, but this one comes far down into the forest, so that flowers and shrubbery are sprouting all around its lower margin, whence a dozen rivulets gurgle out to feed the river. The rounded forefoot is broken, where blocks of loosened ice have been sloughed off, and seamed with numberless cracks, the commencement of further sloughings. These cracks and the freshly exposed faces are vividly blue, while liquid turquoise fills all the cavities and deepens to ultramarine in the shadows; but the general tone of the glacier, as it slopes steeply upward in billowy undulations toward the head of the ravine, is grayish white. Curving crevasses cross from flank to flank, and longitudinal rifts gash the surface as if cut with a sharp knife in an elastic substance. These crevasses may be as blue as the clearest sky, or sometimes green as young grass, according to the light; and between are often pure-white patches of fresh snow. Toward the top (where the breadth is nearly two miles) the slope is still steeper and the surface smoother; but along the very crest, jagged and hard against the sky, thousands of fractures appear, indicating how the mass of ice breaks, rather than bends, as it is pushed over the cliffs. These breaks then reunite, and the chaos becomes the smoothly congealed and undulating surface we see below.