The Canadian Rocky Mountains ¹

Abstract

THIS attractive volume is more than a record of mountain climbing. It gives the reader a very good idea of a considerable area of the Great Lone Land, its fine scenery and physical characteristics, introducing him to not a few “untrodden peaks and unfrequented valleys.” Between the eastern base of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and the Pacific shore the earth's crust has been crumpled into a zone of parallel folds more than 500 miles in breadth, which have been deeply sculptured by meteoric agencies. South of the American border these mountains are distinguishable into the Rockies proper and the Sierra Nevada, parted one from another by the broad plateau of Utah, the latter chain being flanked on the west by the Coast Range. In Canada the three are practically fused together, the peaks running in successive ranges, almost like waves of the sea. Messrs. Stutfield and Collie selected as their field of work the region on both sides and immediately west of the continental watershed to the north of Hector Pass—that traversed by the Canadian Pacific Railway. This region, so far as they saw, consists entirely of sedimentary rocks—limestone, sometimes dolomitic, with shales or slates. It is, as mountaineers will see from the illustration which we reproduce, not unlike the Western Oberland, between the Blumlis Alp and the Diablerets, greatly enlarged laterally but not vertically, the higher peaks ranging commonly from about 10,500 to rather under 12,000 feet. The mountains, in fact, were less lofty than the authors had anticipated. One of their few predecessors had, indeed, reported the existence, some dozen leagues north of the railway, of two Alpine giants, Mount Brown and Mount Hooker, rising on either side of a pass, the one to an elevation of 16,000 feet, the other only 300 feet lower, and asserted that he had scaled the former. As, however, this indicated an ascent of about 9000 feet in little more than half an early summer's day, experts were sceptical; the more so when Prof. Coleman, of Toronto, ten years ago found a mountain only just more than 9000 feet high where Mount Brown should be. These giants, in the course of the explorers' four journeys, were proved to be as great impostors as the Mont Iseran and Aiguille de la Vanoise of the Graian Alps some half-century ago.