Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 2.djvu/36

212 hid all the mountain tops, and the prospect was gloomy. But at 4 o'clock we set out, hoping the adverse weather might change with the rising sun.

It was a silent, wet, chilly tramp that we four had by the early light up the Illecillewaet path for a half hour; then we branched off into a narrow trail to the left through dripping weeds and bushes, across two streams, uncomfortably wide and full even at that hour, and up a wooded ridge that led us to the terminal moraine of the Vaux Glacier. Here we found conditions of ascent better than usual. The crevasses were safely filled with hardened snow, and when the glacier became much steeper, the snow gave us a fine footing to kick our steps in it and make it our stairway. With this advantage we came at 7.45 to the bergschrund. This had always been one of the most serious obstacles to the ascent; but, thanks to the enormous masses of snow that had fallen the previous season and until early summer, the dreaded chasm was, when we happened to reach it, no chasm at all, and we could walk directly up to the cliff that forms the head wall of the glacier basin. Up this we swarmed with much use of our arms. The foot-holds and hand-holds were small, but generally more secure than in the Rockies. Two hundred feet up we came to a series of horizontal ledges none too wide, but wide enough for our purpose. These we followed straight across the face of the wall to the left until we reached the main mass of the mountain. Along this part of the way we had some encouraging weather promises; patches of blue sky appeared, and once for a few minutes the whole pinnacle of Sir Donald was free from clouds. How huge it towered in that sudden nearer exhibition!

Arrived at the end of this ledge, we stopped for twenty minutes for our breakfast. Then we tackled a narrow gully, one of the bugbears of the ascent, for it is the pathway of much falling rock. And so with anxious upward glances, and hurrying feet, we got through it as