Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 2.djvu/29

Rh brought us to its crest and along it we took our way. The whole ridge was clothed with fresh green grasses and blossoming heather, through which flowed here and there silvery streamlets of purest crystal. Clusters of trees were scattered about in reckless order, and gorgeous flowers in wild profusion made fragrant the air. In Indian file we moved along, ever on our right the mountain, and far below on the left the Squamish Valley and the ice-clad range beyond. Once a deer went bounding past with swift graceful motion, and then some fleecy clouds floated by. A few hours brought us to a commanding knoll, and here at timber-line we pitched camp in a group of dwarfed balsams. We now had a view behind Garibaldi of a vast sea of unknown mountains, glaciers and lakes.

After a somewhat uncanny night we awoke to find ourselves enveloped in clouds, so dense that our knoll seemed a little island in mid-ocean. All morning was spent in camp in that heavy, silent fog, but in the afternoon two of us set off with one of our guides for the base of the peak. It took two hours to get to it, steadily tramping up slopes of shale and snow in the thick fog. And then we reached a point where there was no sign of vegetation, and from whence we beheld the wildest scene of the trip. We stood on the top of a huge mass of rock, on one side was a precipice vanishing below in clouds, and on the other a very steep slope of trap rock, up which the clouds were surging from out the Tsee-Ki canyons. Within a stone's throw on the left darkly loomed the red walls of the dome of Garibaldi, and from a glacier at its base rushed a noisy little streamlet, the very head of the Tsee-Ki, which we had followed for twenty-five miles.

Early next morning the whole party set out to make an attempt at the ascent; but when we reached the snow-field below the peak, silent, desolate and trackless, the party would go no further. The fog gathered thickly