36 CAMP-FIRES IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES 



In our little corner of British Columbia, the heights 

 are of the kind which may best be described as house- 

 roof mountains. They are cleanly cut, they rise very 

 steeply and have very narrow valleys. Often they ter- 

 minate at the top in sharp knife-edges, and fairly bristle 

 with peaks and precipices. In them, travel by pack-train 

 means creeping up or down the narrow valleys until a 

 crossable divide is found. Travel on foot, especially in 

 hunting, always means hard climbing, either up or down. 

 In hunting, you climb up a long and steep acclivity, hop- 

 ing for a restful table-land at the top, only to find the 

 summit a chisel's edge terminating at either end against 

 a sheer precipice. Usually the other side of every ridge 

 is worse than the first, dropping down into a great basin, 

 so fast and so far that you halt dismayed at the thought 

 of going down to the bottom, and climbing back again 

 before nightfall. With the Columbian Rockies, famil- 

 iarity breeds anything but contempt. 



All the valleys that we saw in the mountains between 

 the Elk and the Bull were very narrow, and difficult to 

 traverse. Take a small postal card, bend it along the 

 middle into a right angle, and you will have, if you set 

 it up on the apex of the angle, a very fair representation 

 in miniature of the mountain-slopes in the goat moun- 

 tains, and the width of the valleys between them. There 

 are many places where the valleys between high moun- 

 tains are not over fifty feet wide at the bottom, and above 

 that you work hard for every foot that you win. 



In nine miles out of every ten, the mountain-sides are 

 so steep, or so badly enmeshed in down timber, that 



