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AMONG THE SELKIRKS AND CANADIAN ROCKIES.

W. C. W. GIEGER.

I had often heard of the grandeur of the scenery in the Selkirks and Rockies along the Canadian Pacific Railway. My imagination had painted well, but the reality is far better.

From Portland, Oregon, North to Tacoma and Seattle, Washington, and to Mission Junction, British Columbia, there is almost continuous forest. Lumber camps and saw mills appear all along the line of railway; but their inroads in the great pine forests are as yet scarcely perceptible. In some places the logs are shot down the mountain side, and then again the lumber is floated down in flumes. In other places the great trees have been cut away for a small space and dragged to the mills, leaving the ground covered with great fallen trunks that have gone down before the winds. More rarely there is a forest of dead and blackened trees. Fire often runs from the bottom to the top of a tree and then goes out, leaving the charred trunk to frown down for years on the new growth.

Thick undergrowth, grass and flowers grow close to the track and brush the sides of the coaches, relieving us of the dust that is often so disagreeable in travel. At Huntingdon we glided over the boundary line between Washington and British Columbia, and at Mission Junction I caught the Imperial Limited for the East.

There is but one good train each way a day, so it is necessary to take the sleeper. Canadian sleepers are differently arranged from our Pullmans. In the center 4 sections, 2 on either side, are sofas which run lengthwise of the car and have rolls for pillows. At either end of these sections are arches coming out so as to leave the usual width of the aisle. This gives a pretty drawing room in the center of the coach, and when you are tired you can lie down to pleasant dreams. In the rear, back of the lavatory, is the smoking room, which makes a good observation compartment. Back of this again is the vestibuled platform where, if it is the rear car, you may sit and view the scenery. They sell you a ticket through to St. Paul, and permit you to stop off wherever you choose, and then give you the best berth available when you resume your journey.

Soon the Fraser river is reached and we follow its winding course with great towering mountains on either side. To the right and high over all is Mount Cheam, its cone shaped top far above timber line. Hanging to its sides are large snow fields that glitter in the sunshine, and along its flanks hang

thick clouds, through which the peak pierces the line of the sky. As we advance more snow fields appear. The river runs through a narrow gorge with mountains rising from its edge. Often the cliffs have been cut away to make room for the road bed, and spurs of the mountains have been tunneled. Scarcely is one tunnel passed before another is plunged into. The canyon of the river grows deeper until you look far down on a surging, boiling cauldron of waters hedged in by granite walls. Down the mountains come torrents of water from the snow fields above to the river below.

From the Fraser river the road runs up the canyon of the Illicilliwaet. The climb is hard and the river in almost continuous foam rolls far below, while the mountains rise so far above that at times you can not see their summits from the train. An observation car is run just ahead of the sleeper through the mountains, and you get a fine view from it. Glacier house is 2 miles from the Illicilliwaet glacier at the head of the river. The hotel is a good one though open only a few months in the year. From the hotel there is a good view of the glacier as it rises from the gorge in swell after swell of ice. The glass brings out great crevasses in its surface. The railway company has guides who are skilled glacier and mountain climbers from Switzerland. No charge is made for their services, but I suppose everybody pays them, all the same.

With one of them we started one morning for the ice fields that seemed near but were far away. He could speak little English and I little German, but between the 2 languages we managed to talk. We each carried an alpenstock, steel pointed at one end of the handle and with a double headed pick and adz on the other. The guide carried a long rope. From the foot of the glacier the waters were pouring out everywhere. Great chasms and fissures extended far back in the ice. Into some of these it is possible to walk a considerable distance on rocks, with the water rolling around the feet and the ice walls rising far above. At the water's edge the ice is a clear, pretty blue, fading into white as you look up the walls. At the foot and sides of the glacier the moraine is piled high.

There the guide tied the rope around his waist and about 10 feet down it wound me in, and at about the same distance further a New York man. We went up over the snow until it was too steep to tread with safety and the surface had grown into ice. The guide cut steps in the ice with his pick

and by the aid of these we climbed up. It became steeper all the time. When we came to an almost perpendicular ice wall the guide would cut deeper steps, and, driving our picks into the ice above, we would pull ourselves up after him, step by step. At last the rear man was high enough, and we untied him on a small level place. Then the guide cut steps out over a narrow ledge of ice to a point where we looked down into a yawning chasm 700 feet deep to water rushing over the rocks at the bottom of the glacier. Stroke after stroke of the guide's adz sent splinters of the ice down over me. Step by step we went up the ice cliffs. Each one scaled brought still others into view. I had said we would go to the top, but now I could not see the top; it was in fact miles away.

I recalled that it is much easier to climb a mountain than to descend from it. I looked down. That was fatal. I said I had abandoned the idea of reaching the top and was ready to go down. The guide Ismiled and said we would better go to the top of the wall on the side of which we were hanging. But my decision was irrevocable. He told me how to set the pick and how to go down; to turn my face out into space and hanging to the pick to put one foot down into the step below and then bring the other foot down and so on. Never was first step harder. When a gust of wind came I had to strain every muscle to retain my balance. On the level we step to balance; there you must balance to step. To lean back against the cliff would throw the feet out of the step, and land you in some unreachable chasm. The weight of the body must be borne by the arms with a firm grasp of the pick during part of each step. A little experience brings some skill and confidence and makes glacier climbing almost delightful. Without accident we reached the rocks below with blistered hands and muscles that gave premonition of soreness to appear next day.

Illicilliwaet glacier is said to cover 200 square miles. From there the railroad runs up the Beaver river and then parallels Columbia river until it runs out from the Selkirk mountains into the Rockies. From the Columbia the railway carries us up the canyon of Kicking Horse river. This is the wildest of all the canyons on the line. A heavy engine in front and an equally heavy one behind, pull and push us up the steep grade. With all their great power and effort they are sometimes almost brought to

a halt by the heavy train. So narrow is the canyon that at places its granite sides have been blasted away, and the rocks above overhang the coaches. One rail is sometimes supported by outstanding timbers and the coach seems to be hanging over the foaming water hundreds of feet below. Now you look down on great pine forests waving in the winds; then the walls almost meet and you hear the river below dashing over rocks and falls, with a roar that drowns the noise of the train.

At the continental divide a sparkling stream separates right at the railway track, one branch flowing to the Pacific ocean, the other to Hudson's bay. Up on the mountain side at one place hangs a glacier with a perpendicular wall of ice 800 feet thick that is slowly creeping down and overhangs the deep chasm below. Vast stretches of that region are unexplored and unknown. Banff, the great Canadian summer resort in the Rockies, is surrounded on all sides by great jagged mountains. Hot sulphur springs that afford good bathing, lakes, rivers and waterfalls, are the chief attractions. The Canadian government has reserved a large tract there, and on part of it has in an enclosure of many acres, a herd of buffalo that are fine specimens of this almost extinct animal.

You would not notice but what you were at an American hotel, except when you pay your bill. They give you an itemized statement and a receipt. Most of the guests are Americans. The air is like a tonic, and you glow with pleasant excitement as you climb the mountains or plunge into the waters, row on the lakes or drive over the well graded highways. The Canadians, as far as I have met them, are a quiet, polite and kindly people.

Waving adieu to the hoary headed monarchs of the ranges we turn from the province of Alberta to look out over the wind swept bosom of Assiniboia, a vast level expanse, covered with a stunted growth of grass. With the exception of an occasional Indian village it is uninhabited. The noble red man, his squaw and the papoose come to the stations in considerable numbers to see the train in and to beg. Farther East you now and then see the house of a white man. The summer is so short and the winter so cold that even stock raising is hazardous and water is hard to get. At Portal the customs official goes through our luggage before we enter the land of Uncle Sam.

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PEAKS AND PASSES OF COLORADO.

H. A. CRAFTS.

My preconceived idea of Cameron pass, Colorado, was that it was abrupt, steep and barren; something rather awesome, like the Alpine pass in "Excelsior." I was surprised and delighted when I saw that, on the contrary, its grades are moderate almost to gentleness, its length is continuous and its borders are heavily timbered. From Chambers lake, which lies at the Eastern terminus of the pass, to North Park, where the pass ends, is about 20 miles. Going into North Park the pass has a general Southwesterly trend; yet winds between the wooded slopes of the Medicine Bow range on the North and West, and those of the nearer Rocky mountain range on the South and East, in long and graceful curves. There is no bareness nor desolation, save for a short distance up the pass from Chambers lake, where at some time a fire swept through the forest. There, indeed, the heart of the beholder is made sad at so great a destruction of valuable timber and so cruel a disfigurement to the bright face of Nature. Thousands of acres of once fine timber lands now lie almost as blackened and barren as they did the day following their devastation, so hard does Nature find it to renew herself after one of these fires has done its deadly work. It is one of the aims of our general government to devise means of restoring these denuded lands to their former condition of vigorous forestation.

All over these burnt lands stand the skeletons of the former noble forest trees that clothed them. These make excellent material for fuel, fencing, building, etc., and they are utilized for those purposes to some extent; but their remoteness from industrial centers and the lack of railroad transportation render them unimportant as articles of commerce.

Beyond the burnt districts are the virgin forests, dense, dark and beautiful. They mount grandly aloft on either hand until they end at timber line. Beyond that, and visible from the bed of the pass, rise the bare mountain slopes and the crowning peaks of snow. The pass is traversed by a wagon road, in good condition for the greater part of its length, but with here and there a slough, a washout or a collection of dead trees hurled across it by some snow slide.

An interesting feature of Cameron pass is the divide, or the parting of the waters. This noisy stream, that has made music for us all the way up from Chambers lake, is Joe Wright creek. It flows Eastward and

empties into Chambers lake, which is tributary to the Cache la Poudre river, and this in turn is tributary to the South Platte river. At the summit of the pass, Joe Wright creek ends, and the Michigan creek begins, only the latter flows in an opposite direction, that is, to the Westward, down into North Park, there joining the waters of the North Platte river. All the way over the pass the traveler does not lose company of one or the other of these sociable streams.

Occasionally we see the footprints of the advance guard of modern industry. To one side of the road, in a steep embankment, is a freshly dug prospect hole. At the summit of the pass is an irrigating ditch, a strange anomaly; for this is at an altitude of 10,000 feet above tidewater and there is not a farm within a radius of 75 miles. Nevertheless, the ditch is of some general utility. The Cache la Poudre watershed being short of irrigation water, an irrigating company concluded to take some from the North Platte watershed. They have turned a portion of the water of the Michigan back into the Joe Wright and thus added to the flow of that stream, also of the Cache la Poudre. This provides some extra cubic feet of water per second to the main irrigating canal down on the plains.

At least twice in our journey over the pass our way was obstructed by fallen trees. These are so large, and it is so evident they were all smitten by the same blow, that the traveler intuitively glances to one side to see whence such a gigantic force could have originated. He is surprised if not awestricken to behold a vast opening through the forest above, to the upper limit of timber line, and a view opened to the summit of the range. This is the effect of a snowslide. A vast body of snow, having accumulated in some gulch above timber line, and having become dislodged, started downward, gathering force and momentum at each foot traversed, until it became irresistible and swept down through the mighty forest, cutting a swath like the scythe of some Titanic mower. Imagine the terrible onward rush of such a destroyer; the crash, the groan, the thunder of the avalanche!

One day we made an excursion to Finger, or Sawtooth, mountain, Lake Agnes and Mount Richthoven, 8 miles from Camp Zimmerman. The point of destination was the summit of Richthoven, one of the highest peaks in Colorado, supposed to be at least 15,000 feet above sea level. We

climbed within 1,000 feet of the summit, when we were overtaken by a storm and had to return; yet the memory of that climb is like a page from the Walpurgis Night.

We went on horseback. Three miles of the journey were through thick timber, up a steep mountain trail. Beyond that are 3 miles which can not be traversed by even the surest footed saddle horse, but must be taken on foot, with an ascent in the meantime of a sheer 5,000 feet. The scene is wild, terrible, beautiful! What dizzy heights, what awful precipices! We look aloft and sicken at the thought of defying their terrors. How cruel, how merciless if once they should get us at a disadvantage! Itich by inch, step by step, we pressed onyard and upward, though physically exausted. After every few steps we were compelled to stop, panting, almost gasping, for breath. The exertion of ascent is enough; but the rarity of the atmosphere makes it doubly difficult. Somehow we overcame our weakness. We measured each footstep and planted one foot beyond the other with studied care and deliberation. When we reached a convenient rock we

sat down a few moments. Heavens! How the heart throbs and the lungs labor! Can physical frailty endure it? Possibly, if it is not below the average. Then the heart might stop!

We looked back over the trail below. Not so steep, after all; but then, upward! Ah, those cold, merciless steeps; black and gray, reeking with moisture, the clinging mists and melting snows!

For an hour we climbed over craggy beds of broken rocks and prehistoric snow, to the saddle. A storm descended on us and the wind blew a gale, spitting rain, hail and snow. Strangely enough, at that stupendous height we come across a prospect hole. The prospector had not been long gone, for in the bottom of the hole were his pick and shovel. The wind was pitiless, and all 5 of us got down into the prospect hole for shelter. The storm did not abate, and with the wind blowing 60 miles an hour it was not safe to continue the ascent. So we reluctantly retraced our steps and after an hour of careful work arrived safe at the foot of the mountain and found our horses anxiously awaiting us.

A LARGE ADDITION TO THE PEN.

Here is a reproduction of a photograph that comes to me bearing the following legend:

"Caught by Mr. and Mrs. Burmeister

of this picture don't look like train robbers, then I am no judge of mugs.

The dog shown in the lower left corner of the picture evidently had more sense of

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THE OTTER'S HIGHWAY.

M. S. H.

From boyhood the trapping of fur bearing animals had an indescribable charm for me. The hunting for signs, the careful setting of raps, and the pleasant anticipations, not always realized, when going over the line, make it one of the most fascinating of outdoor pursuits. It also brings one in close communion with nature and is a constant challenge to skill, caution and the practical knowledge of the wild creatures.

More than 20 years ago, late in October, I secured a boarding place among the foothills of the White mountains. It was a good place for trapping. Several ponds, with connecting streams and feeders, and one medium sized lake gave promise that mink and coon could be found. During the several weeks of my stay, I did not meet a trapper; and a few rotting deadfalls were the only signs of the mink and coon hunter. At that time my opportunities for trapping had been limited, and my knowledge of the art was correspondingly slight. I had read with avidity everything pertaining to it, including one or 2 "Trappers' Guides." Could I have had the information found in the articles written by J. A. Newton and published in RECREATION, my catch would have been much larger.

Having plenty of Newhouse traps Nos. I and 11⁄2, I commenced the campaign with much enthusiasm, setting some of the traps in places that a more experienced trapper would not have looked at. I wished to trap foxes, and I tried the simple method of setting traps in paths made by cattle in the mountain pastures. Finding a place where a root grew across the path, I placed a weather beaten chunk of wood a short distance from the root, set the trap between the 2 and covered it with leaves. I caught 2 foxes by this simple plan. If rain or snow came after setting the trap, to destroy the human scent, the chances were much more favorable. The deadly water set I knew nothing about.

Nearly all the fur was caught without bait. The traps were set in the little feeders which ran into the streams or ponds. One trap was set in a stream connecting a swamp with a lake. The first time I went to the place I found a large raccoon in the trap, dead and partly eaten. The coon was caught by its hind foot, leaving fore legs and head free, giving him a good fighting chance. I could only conjecture that a Canada lynx had probably killed him.

One day I started on an exploring trip, looking for signs of coon and mink. I skirted one pond and followed up the stream running into it until I came to a

small pond far up among the hills. Just above that pond, I found a small meadow. The wild grass grew thick and tall. A well defined, much used path ran through the meadow in the direction of a wooded knoll at the upper end. Supposing that the trail was made and used by coons traveling from the pond to the woods beyond, I set in the path a No. 11⁄2 trap, driving a stout piece of wood through the ring in the chain for a clog. The next day a severe rain storm set in, lasting several days.

As soon as the storm was over I followed the same route, finding one coon in a trap set on the shore of the lower pond. Wher I came in sight of the meadow I found it covered with water to the depth of a foo. or more. Skirting the edges of the meadow, I was passing a thick clump of bushes, when an angry snarl and the rattle of the chain showed my catch to be a splendid male otter. Its beautiful coat shone in the sun as it tugged at the entangled clog.

I was surprised and delighted. Making a thorough examination of the surroundings, I found a trail leading from the pond below the meadow, faint compared with that through the tall, wild grasses where the trap was set, but easily seen. At the upper end of the meadow, up the wooded knoll, I followed the trail, over the crest of the hill, and on the farther side I found a deep, dark spring, the head waters of a stream running North. This stream flowed into a large pond and thence into the Saco river. Two trees standing close together on the brink of the spring were worn smooth by the otters' passing through them to the spring, while the pile of droppings, glistening with fish scales, showed that this was a much used resting place. Looking the evidence over, I came to the conclusion that trapping otter was easy, so I dug up the pine needles between the 2 trees and there set the trap. I even neglected the precaution of sprinkling the ground, to destroy as much as possible the human scent. Perhaps it is needless to say that I did not catch another otter. If I had set my trap in the brook my chances would have been much better.

The trapping of the otter caused much talk among the farmers in the vicinity; more than the capture of a bear, for they were trapped occasionally, while I could not hear that an otter had been seen or caught in that locality for many years.

My catch that fall was 3 minks, 3 coons, 2 foxes and the otter. I also caught some muskrats; have forgotten how many. The distance from the pond below the meadow

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