542 



THE PLAJTT WORLD. 



tudes are numerous and would require a considerable amount of 

 study to do justice to them. 



To one who has not seen them before, the glacial streams 

 varvine" all the way from tiny riyulets to mio;hty rushinff tor- 

 rents ; the lateral, terminal and ground moraines ; the englacial 

 and superglacial drift, which like that of the moraines consists 

 of material ranging from the finest clay to huge angular blocks 

 of rock ; the great crevices in the glacier ; the three miles of the 

 Illecillewaet Valley between Glacier and Roger's Pass, with its 

 beautiful yegetation and hundreds, doubtless thousands, of 

 mountain glacial streams ; and the mountains rising abruptly on 

 both sides from three to six thousand feet, some of them as solid 

 monoliths — all make a scene that can scarcely be surpassed for 

 gTaudeur. A general yiew of the yalley is shown in Figure 46. 

 The snowfall yaries from fifteen to forty-five feet per annum ; 

 the rainfall in summer is usually heavy and the streams from 

 the glaciers add to the moisture so that the ecological conditions 

 are moist and (in the whole very |)eculiar. Lichens, mosses, he- 

 patics, ferns, basidiomycetes, rusts, smuts, myxomycetes and 

 seed-plants grow in great profusion in summer, and the place is 

 an ideal one for general botanizing and for the study of plant 

 ecology. But to do the work properly, two or more should go 

 together and stay all summer, in order to have time to study the 

 succession of vegetation, carrying tent, blankets and provisions. 

 In this way valleys and mountains could easily be reached close 

 at hand, which probably have never been seen by men. 



But we must leave the wonderful Illecillewaet Valley, the 

 towering Sir Donald, rising a mile and a quarter above the val- 

 ley as a solid mass of rock, and such other peaks as Eagle, Ava- 

 lanche, Macdonald, Cheops, Ross, Abbott, Afton, Dome, Castor 

 and Pollux, Xapoleon, Swiss Peaks, the whole Hermit Range 

 and others quite as imposing, all of which enclose the Illecille- 

 waet Valley from Glacier to Roger's Pass, only three miles away, 

 and go from Glacier and the Selkirks to Laggan, in the Canadian 

 Rockies, a distance of one hundred miles by rail. Here one is 

 not impressed so much with the mighty grandeur, for the moun- 



