Camping in the Canadian Rockies / an account of camp life in the wilder parts of the Canadian Rocky mountains, together with a description of the region about Banff, Lake Louise, and Glacier, and a sketch of early explorations.

by Walter Dwight Wilcox

CHAPTER XI.

The Waputehk Range—Height of the Mountains—Vast Snow Fields and Glaciers—Journey up the Bow—Home of a Prospector—Causes and Frequency of Forest Fires—A Visit to the Lower Bow Lake—Muskegs—A Mountain Flooded with Ice—Delightful Scenes at the Upper Bow Lake—Beauty of the Shores—Lake Trout—The Great Bow Glacier.

The Summit Range of the Rocky Mountains as they extend northward from the deep and narrow valley of the Kicking Horse River has a special name—the Waputehk Range,—derived, it is said, from a word which in the language of the Stoney Indians means the White Goat.

From the summit of one of the peaks in this range, the climber beholds a sea of mountains running in long, nearly parallel, ridges, sometimes uniting and rising to a higher altitude, and again dividing, so as to form countless spurs and a complicated topography. In this range each ridge usually presents a lofty escarpment and bare precipitous walls of rock on its eastern face, while the opposite slope is more gentle. Here the Cambrian sandstones and shales and the limestones of later ages may be seen in clearly marked strata tilted up, generally, toward the east, though many of the mountains reveal contortions and faults throughout their structure, which indicate the wellnigh inconceivable forces that have here been at work.

The Waputehk Mountains have remained to this day but very little known, and almost totally unexplored, in their interior portions. No passes are known through this range between the Kicking Horse Pass on the south and the Howse Pass on the north. Then another long interval northwards to the Athabasca Pass is said by the Indians to offer an impassable barrier to men and horses. The continuity of the range is well indicated by the fact that, for a distance of one hundred miles, these mountains present only one pass across the range available for horses. The several ridges which form this range rise to a very uniform altitude of 10,000 or 11,000 feet. On Palliser’s map of this region, one peak north of the Howse Pass, Mount Forbes, is accredited with an altitude of 13,400 feet, and the standard atlases have for many years placed the altitude of Mount Brown at 16,000 feet, and that of Mount Hooker at 15,700 feet, but there is much reason to doubt that any mountains attain such heights in this part of the Rocky Mountains.

A heavy snowfall, due to the precipitation brought about by this lofty and continuous range, as the westerly winds ascend and pass over it, and the existence of many elevated plateaus, or large areas having gentle slopes, have conspired to make vast névé regions and boundless snowfields among these mountains. From the snowfields, long tongues of ice and large glaciers descend into the valleys, and thus drain away the surplus material from the higher altitudes. No other parts of the Rocky Mountains, south of Alaska, have glaciers and snowfields which may compare in size or extent with those of the Waputehk Range.

The Waputehk Range.
Looking across the range from near Hector.

The desolate though grand extent of gray cliffs and boundless snowfields, extending farther than the eye can reach, when seen from a high altitude, gives no suggestion of the delightful valleys below, where many beautiful lakes nestle among the green forests, and form picturesque mirrors for the surrounding rugged mountains. On the shores of one of these mountain lakes, in the genial warmth of lower altitudes, where the water is hemmed in, and encroached upon, by the trees and luxuriant vegetation fostered by a moist climate, the explorer beholds each mountain peak as the central point of interest in every view. Each cliff or massive snow-covered mountain then appears an unscalable height reaching upward toward the heavens,—a most inspiring work of nature, raising the eyes and the thoughts above the common level of our earth. When seen from high altitudes, a mountain appears merely as a part of a vast panorama or a single element in a wild, limitless scene of desolate peaks, which raise their bare, bleak summits among the sea of mountains far up into the cold regions of the atmosphere, where they become white with eternal snow, and bound by rigid glaciers.

Having become much interested in reports of the vast dimensions of the glaciers in the Waputehk Mountains, and the beauty of the lakes, especially near the sources of the Bow River and the Little Fork of the Saskatchewan, I started on August 14th, 1895, with the intention of visiting those regions and spending some time there. My outfit consisted of five horses, a cook, and a packer. I had engaged Peyto for the latter service, as he had been most efficient on our trip to Mount Assiniboine. We left Laggan a little before noon. Not far from the station, there commenced an old tote-road, which runs northward for many miles toward the source of the Bow River. This tote-road had been hastily built for wagons, previous to the construction of the railroad through the Kicking Horse Pass, for at one time it was thought the line would cross the range by the Howse Pass.