A Week Around Mount Robson 



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started out on the trail — riding, rather against our will. But 

 there were swift, strong rivers to be forded and we had no 

 choice. Robson was still cloud-hung, and its great front, 

 streaked with horizontal strata of brown and yellow, and gul- 

 lied with snow and ice, towered above us, black and menacing, 

 to unguessed heights. Our trail led up the Grand Fork Canon, 

 through flats of contorta pines, and up among woods of hem- 

 locks and Douglas firs, moss-carpeted like the coast forests. 



True alpine scenery began at Kinney Lake, a smooth sheet 

 of robin's-egg blue walled by the shining slope of Whitehorn. 

 The lake lies at the lower end of the Valley of a Thousand 

 Falls. One after another the cascades came into view — slant- 

 ing obliquely over ledges; dropping in dainty veils of mist, 

 wind-tossed to nothing before they reached the ground ; slow- 

 rocketing down from great heights; booming deep in rocky 

 chasms; and above them all the mighty Emperor Falls, pour- 

 ing down in full sunlight. High above, too, hung the White- 

 horn Glacier, with sharp-toothed seracs cutting blue and white 

 gashes in the sky. 



Then up into fields of asters and paintbrush we climbed, and 

 through alluring patches of wild strawberries and raspberries, 

 to a valley whose whole floor was filled by the river bed. For 

 half a mile we splashed from one gravel bar to another through 

 torrents of muddy glacier water. It is a curious, and at first 

 rather a terrifying, experience to ride into a river up to the 

 horse's girths. The current swept past with such speed that 

 the laboring horse ahead seemed to be standing still, and only 

 by the heaving sensation could I realize that my own horse 

 was moving. 



Above this river-trail came a gravelly waste. Fan-shaped 

 deposits from glacial side-streams pushed the river close under 

 Mount Robson. We had rounded the mountain and were now 

 on its northern side. Instead of a wall of rock, as on the 

 southern and western faces, the mountain here was a seamed 

 and shattered wall of ice. The Tumbling Glacier, lost in 

 clouds above, broke oflf in a sharp white cliff into Berg Lake. 

 A fleet of fairy ice-ships was drifting in it, and as we rode 

 along its shore a crashing avalanche set a host of new bergs 

 afloat. 



