Arthur Oliver Wheeler

“ Wheller writes with enthusiasm of this upper valley, none more beautiful among alpine valleys. In every direction silver water falls leap from the snows and glaciers above, uniting in one central stream which falls in foaming cataracts to the little lake-bed whence, continually increased by fresh falls, it rushes through luxuriant meadow-lands in a second series of cascades that have worn down to bed-rock showing the veneer of soil overlaying it. ”

“ Our eyesight caromed from one bold peak to another for miles in all directions. The wind blew fiercely across the ridge and scuddy clouds were whirled in the eddies behind the great towering peaks of bare rock. Everything was covered with a shroud of white, giving the whole landscape the appearance of snow-clad desolation. Far beneath us was the timber-line and in the valleys below the dense timber seemed but a narrow shadow which marked their course. We had no wood for a fire, no bouglis for beds, were wet with perspiration and eating snow to quench our thirst—not a pleasant prospect for camp ”

“ On the alps between timber-line and the glacier, alpine flowers follow each other in gay profusion according to their season. It is of such high, remote and rugged gardens—gardens of wild grandeur, that Victor Hugo was thinking when he said: "These huge old gloomy mountains are marvellous growers of delicate flowers; they avail themselves of the dawn and the dew better than all your meadows and hillocks can do it." ”

“ Wheeler gives us a touch of their glamour, and yet a glamour not theirs but ours: "Often have the recesses of these mountain fastnesses echoed to the stirring strains of a French-Canadian camp song; and the camp-fire, flickering among the dark shadows of the pines, has lighted up the bronzed and strikingly characteristic features of bourgeois voyageur and redskin, men who lived hand in hand with nature, to whom the trackless forest was an open book and the surging rapids an everyday pastime." ”

“ For the speedier railway, soon to connect the Kicking Horse and Crow's Nest Passes, will carry the ore and the cattle and all the merchandise of trade created by a people who will live in comfort or wealth and die in the valley. Though the bottles of heaven are stopped for two months and more in summer, irrigation will make the dry benches and inter vals "rejoice and blossom as the rose." An occasional motor-boat is now seen where fleets of this modern pleasure craft will soon be familiar. ”

“ At the upper end of the valley the trail, rising high above the brook, has been cut from the mountain side. Here the tongue or snout of the Asulkan Glacier first comes in sight, partly buried in the piles of rock, mud, and boulders forming its terminal moraine, an accumulation borne down and deposited by the glacier through the course of ages. ”

“ The beautiful forests on the floor of the valley are interspersed with open marshy meadows of bright green. These and the sinuous, milky river make striking though harmonious contrast in color. Much of the timber on the mountain slopes, where the valley is traversed by the railway, has been burned during construction days; and now nothing remains of these grand forests but an unsightly array of gaunt skeletons and fallen giants. Fires are the bane of the mountains. Since the advent of the railway, forests containing trees centuries old have been destroyed ”

“ Sir Donald, rising 10,625 ft. above the sea, with five miles of almost sheer cliffs 3,000 ft. high. To our left, and west of the Beaver for more than twenty miles, peak after peak towered aloft surpassing 10,000 ft., but one and all, from top to base, were clad in glacier and snow. Not a living thing was visible and the sense of desolation and awful loneliness conveyed was overpowering. Nowhere else in the mountains have I seen such immense masses of glaciers and ice-fields and I believe that little of the area in which these lie has yet been trodden by man. ”

“ To the east is the broad expanse of the Toby Glacier, to the south-east the towering peaks from which the glacier sweeps, and to the south one of the noblest mountains bear- ing some of the most beautiful and pure glaciers that I have ever seen. ”

“ Another attractive road leads through cedars and giant conifers down the Columbia Valley, and one follows the Illecillewaet River to Greely Creek. A long road up the Columbia will, when completed, run as far north as Tête Jeune Cache to a junction with the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. These roads by rivers and lakes through mountain forests where there is scarcely a sign of humanity except the road itself and where the small game chatters under the boughs, are not only desirable for riders and drivers of horses and motors, but for the immortal walkers akin to Hazlitt and Stevenson. ”

“ Above, to the right, are terraces of ice and snow, cracked and seamed in every direction by yawning crevasses; to the left rise the precipices of rock confining the Illecillewaet Neve, the snow cornices with which they are crested showing how ready is that lake of snow and ice to overflow its bounds. A feature of this upper part of the valley is the number of hoary marmots or whistlers (Arctoinys Columbianus) that make their homes here among the rocks. Their shrill whistle is very human, and startling to the unknowing, and they are oftener heard than seen. ”

“ You may spend a week of fine weather at Glacier House, and every morning watch the thin mist which gathers in the narrow valley at night lift in drift of thinnest violet-grey cloud and play idly about the close green forest spires and creep upward over rock to vanish under the sun's morning rays in the upper heights. ”

“ To the north and west the primeval forest rises to grassy alpine slopes decked with brilliant flowers; beyond are icy glaciers and fields of pure white, sloping gently to the curving ridges that lead upwards to rocky peaks capped with snow. ”

“ With intelligence and care and the employment of capable and trusty guides, a novice is as safe on glacier or cliff as on our congested city streets.
Much has been written about the advantages and the joys of mountaineering, but the great inducement is, more than all other inducements, the unimaginable visions that unfold before the climber as he climbs. No man (and the word includes woman) can climb above these forests and over these glaciers, measuring these peaks with their own footsteps, without becoming thrall to the snowy Selkirks. ”

“ Climbing for pay and paying for climbing are not the same. "I climb because I must," says one; "I climb because I like it," says the other: each phrase an apologetic, supremely terse and unanswerable. And though mountaineering as a sport—now and always the sublimest of all sports—followed the railway, which ran hard by group after group of unknown attractive alpine peaks, Canadians were not of it. True, in 1883, occurred that picturesque incident on the summit of Rogers Pass, when a Canadian Alpine Club was organized with three members, a president, secretary and treasurer ”

“ This trail of the Beaver Valley will be rebuilt; and many an old trail, blazed by the prospector and woodsman and long since abandoned, will again respond to the human foot and the tread of the pack-train. When the Selkirk jungle is cleared away from the narrow path, the newcomer, albeit a common-place globe-trotter and quite inferior in interest and picturesqueness to those earlier, ruder treaders of the trail whose goal was some fabulous eldorado, will be travelling that hidden way for pleasure only. May the day never come in the Selkirks when the pack-train will cease ”

“ For it is here that their resources are developed, "rooting themselves in inhospitable rocks, stooping to look into the ravines, hiding from the search of glacier-winds, reaching forth to the rays of rare sunshine, crowding down together to drink at sweetest streams." Then he shows to every lover of forest landscape how great is the advantage of mountain over plain. And who that watches the mountain, has not been conscious of it. ”

“ In letters though perhaps not in science, you might call it a hanging valley of lavish living forests and flowers. A lonely glen high in the depression of high hills, the road, wide enough for motors to pass, climbs for 10 miles with changing views of distant mountains at its every sharp curve or round corner. ”

“ Here, climbers from the Alps, the Caucasus, the Kuwenzori, the Himalaya and other mountain regions have told their tales to listening ears, giving both knowledge and inspiration. It is an unforgettable picture that of the camp-fire with its huge red coals glowing, its flames flapping and its myriad sparks flying upward in the velvet darkness, the guardian mountains standing round about, and the forests silent with the essential silence of windless night ”

“ It is hoped that the Guide will be of use to the mountaineer, and may enable the general public to enjoy more readily the unique alpine beauties of these white-shrouded peaks, mighty ice-falls and hazy blue valleys, where wild glacial torrents foam through primeval forests and silver falls leap down precipices from the snows above. ”

“ A ridge, perhaps 1,000 feet above the meadows, commands an outlook far-reaching—a confusion of glaciers and rock-summits, every grey peak in strong sunlight transmuted to faint sapphire among the white, white snows. ”

“ Sir Donald and the black precipitous wall of the eastern escarpment of the Selkirks' Summit. At the base of this great wall, high on the slopes of Beaver Valley, a long array of pocket-glaciers are in plain sight, and the glaciers of Mt. Sir Donald, Uto and Eagle Peaks; and the climber gets a peep into Glacier Circle, an alpine park of rare beauty set in the ice and snows of the Dawson Range. Bald Mountain furnishes first-rate hunting for such big game as cariboo, bear and goat. It is a paradise for the botanist, brilliant alpine flora following each other in quick succession ”

“ Though a bit of a frolic in the pause of the hardships of mountain travel without even a trail—and unless you know devil's club and the jungle mixed with its forests you know nothing of trailless travel in the Selkirks—the perspective of the years now shows that prophetic episode in a fine glamour. ”

“ Simpson's progress to the Bow River across the Cascade River and up the valley past Cascade Mountain and admiring the stream issuing from its side and falling like a silver ribbon to its foot, is a pretty story. Goat and sheep were clambering about the mountains. They camped on the right bank of the Bow, horses and all crossing on a raft covered with willows. Instead of ascending the Bow valley, Simpson turned south by Healey's Creek, ascending the tributary valley and traversing the Pass which received his name, and so crossed the watershed and pushed on towards the Columbia and the Kootenay. ”

“ The Selkirks themselves constitute an immense mountain system over 300 miles long, of interlocking ranges some 400 miles inland from the Pacific Coast. They are richly forested, vegetation being almost tropical in its rank growth, and bear innumerable snowfields and glaciers. They are ages older than the eastern or higher range and were once the crest of the chain "rearing their serrated and snow-capped summits above the prehistoric ocean when their neighbours, the Rockies, were as yet unborn beneath its ice-bound bosom." ”

“ When Hector discovered the Kicking Horse River, he was beyond the Great Divide, having followed the route he found to the south of the beautiful glacier-bearing region lying about Lake Louise that forms a group of the Summit Range.
Before ever a white man saw the Rockies, the Indians had called them the Shining Mountains, and afterwards the Stony Mountains. The first white men to look upon them and to stand within their shadow were French Canadians, though it is an anachronism to call them so. ”

“ The Alpine Club has given an immense impetus to mountaineering among Canadians, and it bids fair to become a national sport. This it ought to be, considering that Canada has the two factors necessary — and a third which is more than a tertium quid, even ample railway transit over the long distance from east to west. The two factors are mountains and men. Her alpine territory covers an enormous area; her people are made of the flesh-stuff and soul- stuff that go to the making of mountaineers. ”

“ Modern discovery and Exploration began in the Selkirks in 1865, under Mr. Walter Moberly, an eminent engineer who came to Vancouver Island in 1858 by way of Cape Horn, his ulterior purpose being to search for the shortest low-level route through the Rocky Mountain system. A man of vision, he saw the day when the mountains would no longer separate east and west in Canada, when men would ride to and fro on a trans-continental railway. Mr. Moberly's career is part and parcel of the history of the great railway's advent, and in itself is a record of historic importance. ”

“ All this country south of Revelstoke is of extreme interest to capitalists, miners, farmers and sportsmen. It has been vigorously advertised by the Railway Company and by investors. But the tourist will be very well repaid in a hundred miles or more of as fine, and finer landscape of wooded mountain and valley and lake than can be found anywhere outside the Highlands of Scotland. Indeed, there is nothing in Scotland so expansive and at once so beautiful. ”

“ It is an enchanted valley. "The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep," and the sunlight is the light of no common day. The gloom and the glory of mountain beauty meet in the valley. This feeling is intensified by the continuous sound of rushing waters, now faint when the path enters the woods, now filling the air as the torrent sweeps by at your feet. ”