118 SO UR CES OF THE SA SKA TCHE WA N 



ious that the packs should not take fire and cause a stampede 

 among the horses, so for a considerable distance we drove our 

 animals along the edge of a lake and frequently waded deep in 

 the water to avoid the heat of blazing trees. 



After an exhausting march of six hours we made our camp in 

 a muskeg, or swamp, about half a mile from the fire. The wind, 

 however, which had been increasing for a time, began to carry 

 the fire toward us, and our situation soon became alarming when 

 some heavy timber began to blaze and the columns of flame, 

 shooting hundreds of feet into the air, made a terrifying roar, 

 which caused our horses to stop feeding. At one time a funnel- 

 shaped whirlwind about 200 feet high formed over the heated 

 area and remained there a few moments. 



At the rate of progress the fire was making, we should soon 

 have been surrounded had we not packed up and moved a mile 

 further down the valley. The second camp was made by the 

 side of a considerable stream, wide enough to stop the fire ; but 

 toward evening cloud banners began to form at the peaks of the 

 mountains, and next day, after many weeks of drought, rain fell 

 steadily for ten hours and fortunately extinguished for a time 

 the fires that were destroying this beautiful valley. 



We were now two days' journey down the Little Fork valley, 

 a distance of about 18 miles in a straight line. We remained in 

 camp the next day to do a little survey work from a mountain 

 to the east. From this point, at an altitude of 8,000 feet, the 

 Little Fork valley appears straight, deep, and comparatively 

 narrow, with a number of lateral valleys coming in from the 

 west side and cutting the mountain masses into projecting spurs. 

 The strata of the mountains are for the most part nearly hori- 

 zontal, and the cliffs are frequently almost vertical. There were 

 six lakes in view from our survey point, of which two, each 

 about a mile long, were merely expansions of the river, three 

 were in lateral valleys, and one lay far up the valley where the 

 river takes its source. The lateral valleys head in the summit 

 range to the west and probably have never been visited. 



The scenery is very grand near the lakes. A striking peak 

 about 10,000 feet in height, with a precipitous rock face and 

 wedge-shaped summit, stands guardian, and, together with the 

 jagged mountains near it, helps to give a gloomy, fiord-like ap- 

 pearance to the region. Mt Murchison is supposed to lie in a 

 group of mountains to the east of this place, and, as seen from 

 the Pipestone pass by Dr Hector, was estimated to be 13,600 



