Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 2.djvu/39

Rh soon as we could, and halted for rest and breath, crouched at the foot of an overhanging cliff that rose vertically hundreds of feet above us, its face from top to bottom so jagged and loose-jointed, with such fresh-looking cleavage, that it threatened at any moment to drop tons of wreckage at our feet. The weather had grown thick again, streams of leakage were trickling down upon us, and so we kept our refuge no longer than we really had to.

Just beyond this halt we struck to the right and somewhat upwards over the face of the main peak; at first across a shallow couloir 200 feet wide, plainly in most of its curving width a pathway of rocky débris, where watchful eyes and active feet were needed. Beyond this a traverse was made of a rather steep snow slope. We were still two parties, and so we took the couloir and the traverse separately, Miss Parker and young Feuz going first, and then when they had got well started on the snow, the elder Feuz and I followed rapidly. Luckily, neither in this couloir nor in the one below had we to dodge so much as a pebble. In this we fared much better than some of our predecessors.

Our course lay towards the conspicuous shoulder on the right of the mountain, and thence along the sky-line to the top. The climbing was steady and slow and always somewhat strenuous, but in two and a half hours from our refuge under the cliffs, we came suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly upon the summit.

Miss Parker was the first Canadian woman to tread that windy peak. Only four women had preceded her, Mrs. Berens, Miss Benham and Miss Tuzo of Old England, and Miss Raymond of New England, all four names well known to the mountain-climbing world.

We were almost exactly eight hours in going from the Glacier House to the summit. We had been shut in by clouds and snow squalls for some time, and in a continuance of such condition with no view beyond a few