T*he Cassiar Trail 



The timber hereabouts is mostly willow or poplar on 

 the low ground, with here and there pine, birch, and 

 spruce about fifty feet high. None seen much exceeded 

 a foot in diameter. Thousand-acre patches have been 

 destroyed by fire. Some of the green trees had been 

 burned off at the root, the raised roots, packed in dry 

 moss, being readily attacked from beneath. A range 

 of mountains about five thousand to six thousand 

 feet high trending nearly north and south for sixty 

 miles is forested to the s.ummit. Only a few cliff-faces 

 and one of the highest points patched with snow are 

 treeless. No part of this range as far as I could see is 

 deeply sculptured, though the general denudation of 

 the country must have been enormous as the gravel- 

 beds show. 



At the top of a smooth, flowery pass about four 

 thousand feet above the sea, beautiful Dease Lake 

 comes suddenly in sight, shining like a broad tranquil 

 river between densely forested hills and mountains. 

 It is about twenty-seven miles long, one to two miles 

 wide, and its waters, tributary to the Mackenzie, 

 flow into the Arctic Ocean by a very long, round- 

 about, romantic way, the exploration of which in 

 1789 from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic Ocean 

 must have been a glorious task for the heroic Scotch- 

 man, Alexander Mackenzie, whose name it bears. 



Dease Creek, a fine rushing stream about forty 

 miles long and forty or fifty feet wide, enters the 

 lake from the west, drawing its sources from grassy 

 mountain-ridges. Thibert Creek, about the same size, 

 and McDames and Defot Creeks, with their many 



[ 791 



