Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 1.djvu/29

16 it was still an amphitheatre of mountains that opened out before us, and Roche à Myette seemed as far off as ever. Soon the Riviére de Violon was heard brawling round the base of Roche à Perdrix and rushing on like a true mountain torrent to the Athabaska. We stopped to drink to the Queen out of its clear ice-cold waters, and halted for dinner in a grove on the other side of it, thoroughly excited and awed by the grand forms that begirt our path for the last three hours. We could now sympathize with the daft enthusiast, who returned home after years of absence, and when asked what he had as an equivalent for so much lost time,—answered only, "I have seen the Rocky mountains."

Myette is the characteristic mountain of the Jasper valley. There are others as high, but its grand bare forehead is recognized everywhere. It is five thousand eight hundred feet above the valley, or over nine thousand feet above the sea. Doctor Hector, with the agent in charge of Jasper House, climbed to a sharp peak far above any vegetation, three thousand five hundred feet above the valley, but the great cubical block which formed the top towered more than two thousand feet higher.

The views this afternoon from every new point were wonderfully striking. Looking back on Roche à Perdrix, it assumed more massive proportions than when we were immediately beneath. A huge shoulder stretched up the valley, one side covered with bare poles, grey as itself, and the other with sombre firs. From it, the great summit upreared itself so conspicuously, that it filled the background and closed the mouth of the valley.

But the most wonderful object was Roche à Myette, right above us on our left. That imposing sphinx-like head with the swelling Elizabethan ruff of sandstone and shales all around the neck, save on one side where