Page:The Selkirk mountains (1912).djvu/15

Rh THE SNOWY SELKIRKS. "Every side my glance was bent O'er the grandeur and tlie beauty lavished through the whole ascent. Ledge by ledge, outbroke new marvels, now minute and now immense: Earth's most exquisite disclosure, Heaven's own God in evidence." La Saisiaz The Selkirk Mountains have their own lovers to whom no snows are so white as the Selkirk snows and no clouds so radiant, no forests so darkly beautifully green. There the cedar, hemlock, fir, spruce, grow together in the rich valleys, climbing in serried ranks to meet the blue ice, softening every sharp outline to a gentle undulation. There hang myriads of glaciers festooning the high mountain walls, and there the curved mounds and cornices of driven snow beautify the harsh mountain-faces. And there, if the pilgrim only travel far enough, whole .summits are white against the blue sky, grey rock scarcely showing above the green forest. For, from the Railway and the hotel, you see but a strip of the Selkirks. It is the place to absorb the phenomena of alpine beauty in forest and snow; the place to study the phenomena of alpine structures and alpine vegetation. Nor is that rainbow-edged phenomenon, the "Spectre of the Brocken" wanting.

It is not that the Selkirks are really more beautiful than the Rockies; it is only that they are differently beautiful. In all mountain ranges, the human association counts for much, and that was a true word of Sir Leslie Stephen's who said that the mountains retain every pure and tender emotion once associated with them. It is as true of mountains as of human landmarks in populous places of the earth. And I .suppose this is how the Selkirks keep the first place in the hearts of those who know them well.

Though mountaineering as a sport began in the Selkirks some years before the now popular climbing regions of the Rockies began to be exploited, of late years the public hears less of these ranges so lavishly clad with forest and so heavily weighted with ice, and more of those barer but very beautiful regions about Lakes Louise, Moraine, and O'Hara—more about the Yoho Valley and the Waputehk Snowfields. In truth these splendid ranges lying beyond the Asulkan and Illecillewaet Neves exploited in the late eighties and I early nineties and afterwards surveyed and mapped by Mr. Wheeler, have been very little climbed. It seems as though the Railway Company has encouraged travellers to tarry or even to halt at the centres in the Rockies rather than at Glacier House. There should be no rivalry, say between two such strategic mountain places as Lake Louise and Glacier. Each has its own superb alpine charms; each provides sumptuous climbing. (Dear tourist, the adjective belongs solely to the mountains.) Had both Government and Railway Company spent as much money on roads and accommodation at Glacier as at Lake Louise; and had the attractions of the Selkirks been emphasized proportionately, it might have been that Glacier House to-day were as large as the Chalet at Lake Louise. Manv travellers leaving but a day at the end of the