Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/204

196 plains of Assiniboia and swings westward, hour after hour, over the silent ranges furrowed everywhere by unnumbered feet of the departed herd. It rises to the foothills beyond Calgary and sights the white wall of the Rocky mountains a hundred miles away. It plunges through the Gap at Canmore, ascends the valley of the Bow between colossal peaks, crosses the continental divide at Laggan, drops down the canyon beside a foaming torrent to the mountain-girt valley of the Columbia, rises again mile after mile into the icy air of Rogers Pass amid the glaciers of the Selkirk summits and finds its way with the rushing waters of the

Illicillewaet down to the Columbia again at Revelstoke. It hurries through echoing valleys, beside enchanting lakes, across ridges and chasms into the desert along the Thompson. It enters the historic valley of the Fraser and underneath frowning cliffs creeps down the reverberant gorge to the wonderful amphitheaters of Yale and Hope and finally reaches Vancouver and the sea. Then come the steamer voyages through the Straits of Georgia to Victoria and through the Straits of Fuca to Port Renfrew, and at last the invigorating walk through the forest or sturdy pull along the shore. To the lover of nature as well as to the serious student of ecology or plant distribution there is perhaps nowhere in the world a more inspiring and instructive journey of two thousand miles than this. It gives an opportunity of becoming