The Mountaineer 33 
we were to hobnob—and hobnail—later. As far as the eye 
could see, from south to north, the landscape fairly bristled 
with the typical elittering, crevassed glacier fields and jag@ed 
summits of the Selkirks, which, while perhaps not averaging 
quite as high as the neighboring Rockies, have much finer ice- 
fields (excepting such northern ice-fields in the Rockies as the 
Columbia and Washmawapta), due to greater precipitation, 
and are more Alpine in character. 
We returned to our lower camp in good shape for the 
Mount Hammond climb. Charhe had not returned, and we had 
to go without him. A short distance above our camp Ifammond 
Creek—so named by us—enters North Fork from the north. 
The Emersons and I packed in an almost straight course up 
this creek, camping near the base of the west side of the moun- 
tain, preparatory to attempting the chmb by a route which had 
seemed to me last year a particularly interesting one. 
The steep and direct rise up Hammond Creek from our 
North Fork camp, with its elevation of about 4300 feet, to the 
base camp for our Hammond climb, at 6700 feet, afforded an 
unusually striking illustration of changes from temperate to 
sub-aretic conditions. The trees rapidly dwindled to serub, 
and the character of the flowers, which were beautiful and 
profuse, changed with every few hundred feet of rise. There 
is no lost ground by this route, and it makes a far more interest- 
ing climb, technically and from a sceme point, than the route 
of last vear from Paradise Basin. 
From our camp, in a strip of woods overlooking from the 
left the snow gully at the head of Hammond Creek, we could 
clearly figure out our probable route of the next day, when 
the bright promise of the evening was fulfilled. Outlined 
against the early morning sky line, on July 14, to the northeast 
stood the steep rock and snow profile of Mount Hammond. 
We knew that this aréte that stood out against the sky looked 
down on the farther side vertically to Boulder Creek, and it 
was by this ragged Boulder Creek aréte that we planned to 
ascend until we reached the bastioned crown just below the 
summit. A sharp rise of about two hours, scrambling over 
broken rock slopes and up steep snow gullies, brought us to the 
aréte, and careful climbing up the unstable rock bridge, with 
its tremendous views into the yawning Boulder Creek abyss 
at our left, finally brought us to the crown. This is composed 
