Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 1.djvu/116

Rh ing a tolerable shelter in case of a sudden shower, and under these we spread our blankets with good hope for the morrow. The sun set clear, the stars gleamed with joyous brightness, and with such omens we saw ourselves already the victors over the untamed monster at whose feet we dared to lie so serenely. But "man proposes."

At crisp daylight we were astir, and after a formal breakfast set out at a good pace over the lower flanks of the first ridge south of our bivouac. The evidences of the earlier presence of the gold-hunter were about us; indeed we had been fully twenty minutes under way before we passed the last trace of such a visitation, a claim-stake with the name of the prospector and the bounds of his claim. We merely gave it a sidelong glance in passing, for it seeedseemed [sic] to have been tacitly agreed that no one of the three should first call a halt, so that it was fully an hour before we made our first stop, and then for the purpose of putting on the rope at the beginning of the first real climbing. Still it had not been severe, save as a test of lung power.

Considerable snow lay at the base of the rocks we skirted, and unfortunately it was soft and little promising. At about 10,000 feet, not far, if I remember, above where one ridge joins another striking more to the south, we paused for our second breakfast. Things were now growing more interesting. A superb prospect had opened over the western ridge of the Ice River valley to the gleaming snows of the limitless line of the Selkirks, and near at hand were the forbidding crags and cornices of our own peak. Just above us rose the snowy shoulder over which we were to pass, and from that rose a steep cliff seen in all our reconnaissances, which was apparently the chief obstacle in the way of our success.

Again getting under way, we soon were upon that shoulder, and anon making our way under most tick-