True to our purpose of following the River from source to sea, we turn back now from Spokane in order to go from Kettle Falls to Chelan by boat. There are no regular steamboats running from Kettle Falls to Brewster at the mouth of the Okanogan, but from the last named point to Wenatchee the steamboat is the regular and indeed only means of public travel. Throughout the entire course of two hundred miles from Kettle Falls to Wenatchee the river is wild and swift. Yet steamers have traversed the entire distance, and Government engineers are now engaged in surveys looking to improvements such as will make steamboat traffic easy and profitable. We pass numberless points of interest, but “Chelan, Chelan,” “Beautiful Water, Beautiful Water,” is our goal.
The “Shadowy St. Joe,” Idaho.
Photo. by T. W. Tolman.
We had thought that the Columbia was clear, but we did not then know what clear water really was. When we reach the mouth of Chelan River we know. We see a streak of blue cutting right across the impetuous downflow of the River. As we push our way into it we discover that it is so clear as to make little more obstruction to the view of rocks and fish below than does the air itself. This transparent torrent is the outlet of the lake. It is only four miles long and descends three hundred and eighty feet in that distance. It furnishes one hundred and twenty-five thousand horse-power at low water. The cañon, riven and tortured, through which it descends, is a fitting approach to the lake, unique Chelan. For having traversed the four miles, we find the lake outstretched before us.
At this first view the lake has that look of a serene obliviousness to the flight of passing centuries, that impressure of eternity, that belongs to all great works of God or man. But majestic as is the view at the lower end of the lake, we are not content to remain there. “Neskika Klatawa sahale,” cry we with a single voice, which being interpreted is, “Let us go up higher,” the motto, by the way, of our Mazama (Mountain-Climbers’) Club of the Pacific North-west. In skiffs, well-laden with provisions and ammunition, we set forth on our sixty-mile pull toward “where the spectral glaciers shone.”
Delightful, delightful, almost ecstatic in truth, this rocking on the glassy swell; this bed of romantic spruce and pine boughs on the beach; this star-lit sky which is our only roof; this murmur of cascades falling from the bluffs; this trolling for five-pound trout; this disembarking on some rocky point and climbing a granite pinnacle from which a perfect maze of mountains, streams, and forests, lies extended below; this experience of the deadly attack of “buck-ague” which paralyses our arms as some goat or deer dashes by; and then the inexpressible delight with which we, “stepping down by zigzag paths and juts of pointed rock, came on the shining levels of the lake.” We do not wish to hurry our oars. We must take time to look into the heavenly blue of the waters through the foam-streaks left by our advancing prows. We must suspend the oar-dip entirely at times while we gaze dizzied, with strained necks, up, up, thousands of feet, toward “Death and Morning on the Silverhorns.” We must study shore and water as we pass slowly by, finding therein ample confirmation of the theory of glacial origin.
This is one of the deepest cañons on earth. Not such another furrow has Time wrought on the face of the Western Hemisphere, at least. At some points the granite walls rise almost vertically six thousand feet from the water’s edge. Here, too, soundings of seventeen hundred feet have been necessary to touch bottom. Over a mile and a half of verticality! This surpasses in depth Yosemite, Yellowstone, Columbia, or even Colorado Cañon. As compared with those more familiar wonders, Chelan lacks the incomparable symmetry and completeness of Yosemite; it has not such a multitude of waterfalls and groups of “castled crags” as are seen within the basaltic gates of the Columbia; it does not display that variety of colouring, especially of the lighter and warmer hues, which astonishes the beholder of the Colorado or the Yellowstone, and it has no especially curious feature like the geysers of the last; but for immensity, for a certain chaotic sublimity, for the rich and sombre grandeur of the purple and garnet, dusky, and indigo-tinted shore views, Chelan surpasses any of the others, while in its water views,—such colourings and such blendings, light-green, ultramarine, lapis lazuli, violet, indigo, almost black,—such light and shade, “sea of glass mingled with fire,” where every cloud in the changing sky and all the untold majesty of the hills find their perfect mirror, all hues and forms, a kaleidoscope of earth and heaven, beyond imagination to conceive or pen to describe or brush to portray,—in all this, Chelan is without a rival.
On the Cœur d’ Alene River, Idaho.
Photo. by T. W. Tolman.
As we round a shaggy promontory, there the snow-peaks stand in battle array, azure, purple, amethystine, with lines and masses of glistening white, flushed on their topmost pinnacles with rosy light from the westering sun, solemn, solitary, very oracles of mountain revelation, so grand, so beautiful, so true, looking as though they had been there forever waiting for an interpreter,—before that scene we bow the head and make involuntary obeisance, the homage of the true in man to the true in nature, that is, the recognition of a common brotherhood in one divine origin.