Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 1.djvu/58

Rh necessary to apply to the Department of the Interior at Ottawa for a topographical map of the Rocky or Selkirk mountain ranges, or to look up the maps and text in "Baedeker's Guide to Canada."

Better still, pay a visit to the region. It will not be necessary to leave the train to obtain a view of vast snow-fields and glaciers. If you can spend a few days by the way, a trip to some of the alpine, glacier-hung valleys will soon convince you; for, in these deep recesses, high above timber line, tumbling ice-falls break in every direction through openings in the rock-battlements and sweep in broken cascades of crystal ice to the morainal flats below. Following the path of the mountain goat from crag to crag, until sky-line is reached, the eye wanders over fields of purest white, rolling gently in billowy mounds, broken only by islands and reefs of jagged rock. Many of these snow-fields are of considerable extent, varying from ten square miles in the Illecillewaet, twenty in the Wapta, and thirty in the Brazeau, to between one hundred and two hundred square miles in the Great Columbian snow-field.

In a new and as yet inadequately mapped country, such as Canada, it is impossible to do more than approximate the area that may be described as "alpine." Roughly speaking, it can be placed at 250,000 square miles. This area is embodied by the Cordilleran or Rocky Mountain chain, embracing four principal ranges of mountains and numerous sub-ranges and groups. Enumerating from east to west, we have the Rocky Mountain or Main range, the Selkirk range, the so-called Gold range, and finally the Coast range, lying along the Pacific ocean.

Each of these ranges has its own distinct characteristics. In the Main range, the rocks, generally speaking, belong to the Paleozoic period, and consist for the most part of grey and blue limestones,