Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

There is another kind of romance in the woods about the Château, and one of the policemen who guarded the Prince made its acquaintance during the night. In the dark he heard the noise of some one moving amid the trees that come down to the edge of the hotel grounds. He thought that some unpleasant intruder on the Prince's privacy was attempting to sneak in by the back way. He marched up to the edge of the wood and waited in his most legal attitude for the intruder—and a bear came out to meet him. Not only did it come out to meet him, but it reared up and waved its paws in a thoroughly militant manner. The policeman was a man from the industrial East, and not having been trained to the habits of bears, decided on a strategic withdrawal.

His experience was one of the next day's jokes, since it appears that bears often do come out of the woods attracted by the smell of hotel cooking. On the whole they are amiable, and are no more difficult than ordinary human beings marching in the direction of a good dinner.

From Lake Louise the Prince went steadily west through some of the most impressive scenery in Canada. The gradient climbs resolutely to the great lift of petrified earth above Kicking Horse Pass, so that the train seemed to be steaming across the sky.

A little east of the Pass is a slight monument called "the Great Divide." Here Alberta meets British Columbia, and here a stream springs from the mountains to divide itself east and west, one fork joining stream after stream, until as a great river it empties into Hudson Bay; the other, turning west and leaping down the ledges of valleys, makes for the Pacific.

Beyond "the Great Divide" the titanic Kicking Horse Pass opens out. It falls by gigantic levels for 1,300 feet to the dim, spruce-misted valleys that lie darkly at the foot of the giant mountains. It is not a straight canyon, but a series of deeper valleys opening out of deep valleys round the shoulders of the grim slopes. Down this tortuous corridor the railway creeps lower, level by level, going with the physical caution of a man descending a dangerous slope.

The line feels for its best footholds on the sides of walls that drop sheer away, and tower sheer above. We could look over the side down abrupt precipices, and see through the dense rain of the day the mighty drop to where the Kicking Horse River, after leaping over rocky ramps and flowing through level pools, ran in a score of channels on the wide shingly floor of the Pass.

Beneath us as we descended we could see the track twisting and looping, as it sought by tunnelling to conquer the exacting gradient. The planning of the line is, in its own way, as wonderful as the natural marvel of the Pass. One is filled with awe at the vision, the genius and the tenacity of those great railway men who had seen a way over this grim mountain barrier, had schemed their line and had mastered nature.

At Yoho Station that clings like a limpet near the top of this soaring barrier, the Prince took to horse, and rode down trails that wind along the mountainside through thickets of trees to Field at the foot of the drop. The rain was driving up the throat of the valley before a strong wind, and it was not a good day for riding, even in woolly chaps such as he wore, but he set out at a gallop, and enjoyed the exercise and the scenery, which is barbaric and tremendous, though here and there it was etherealized by sudden gleams of sunlight playing on the wet foliage of the mountain-side and turning the wet masses into rainbows.

During this ride he passed under the stain in a sheer wall of rock that gives the Pass its name. For some geological reason there is, high up in a straight mass of white towering cliff, a black outcrop that is like the silhouette of an Indian on a horse. I could not distinguish the kick in the horse myself, but I was assured it was there, and Kicking Horse is thus named.

From Field, a breathing space for trains, about which has grown a small village possessing one good hotel, the Prince rode up the valleys to some of the beauty spots, such as Emerald Lake, which lies high in the sky under the cold glaciers of Mount Burgess. It was a wonderful ride through the spruce and balsam woods of these high valleys.