Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 1.djvu/182

Rh Van Horne range and Ottertail mountains formed a gleaming row of fangs, guarding the approaches to the mainland beyond.

After taking a few pictures, the rest of the beautiful morning, from ten o'clock, was spent in gathering fossils and studying that old sea bed. With hammer and chisel, I opened Nature's book, and there, page after page, were trilobites of rarest form. Thousands, yea, millions of years ago, those shell fish had crawled slowly along the old sea bottom. Time had heaped a mountain upon them, had raised their ocean floor to a lofty plateau of a mighty continent, had hardened their mud to slate, and their shells to stone. About one o'clock, having eaten my lunch, the desire seized me to take a few views from the peak of Mt. Stephen. So, depositing the trilobites at the gnarled roots of an old dwarfed fir, and shouldering the load of cameras, etc., I set out for the summit. It only took a few minutes to climb to the top of the spur immediately above the fossil bed and to get above the last of the struggling timber growth, when there burst into view a scene that beggars description: Cathedral mountain, its perpendicular heights searching the very heavens, formed one unbroken wall of a vast amphitheatre. There, ridge on ridge, tier on tier, the parallel ledges, cushioned with snow, rose in countless numbers for thousands of feet. In such places as these the spirits of the mountain sit and watch the changing scenes of the hills in the vast arena before them. Sometimes it is a procession of sheep, or goats, or deer, or bear, or the eagle gracefully sailing. Sometimes it is the frisking mountain rat, or the whistling marmot, or the busy haymaker curing his crops of hay on the hot rocks of the slide. Or again it is the grand orchestra of the hills, breaking forth in the roar of the avalanche, the scream of the wind, the fall of the cataract, or the crumbling of the peaks.