Page:The Selkirk mountains (1912).djvu/162

140 SOME UNKNOWN TRAILS BETWEEN GOLDEN AND GLACIER.

(Followed by Mr. Wheeler.)

A journey by trail through the Dogtooth Mountains can even now be made by intrepid persons indifferent to difficulties. With a bridge across the Columbia at Golden, the miners' old trails repaired, and a few new ones blazed, it would be a comfortable and delightful excursion. At present the camp-outfit must be ferried over the River while the horses swim. The trail leads back from the River through a burnt tract, then through green woods and up the mountain sides over a ridge to Canyon Creek, the important little river flowing from the heart of the Dogtooth Range. It has two tributaries leading to abandoned mines; that is, to primitive shafts and a few log shacks on mountain-sides. These three valleys of Canyon Creek have meadows and alplands the habitat of mountain flowers and studded with wide-branching spruce sufficient for shelter through a whole week of rain—first-rate camping grounds. The South Fork of Canyon Creek offers a route to the Spillimacheen trail, requiring only a trail from the summit of the pass at its head down the opposite slopes. Mr. Wheeler twice took a pack-train over this pass as it is.

The head of Canyon Creek itself is surrounded by glacier-bearing mountains whose hanging valleys, holding turf and tarns and streamlets and little parks, are a beaiitiful feature. From the peaks on one side there is a good view of the Columbia Valley showing the railway; from those on the other, the Spillimacheen Mountains show in all their splendours and fascinations of terra incognita, and across the deep Beaver Valley, the more familiar snow-clad giants of the Selkirks appear as if close at hand.

This pass is low and easy, albeit some distance above timberline, and leads to the North Branch of Grizzly Creek which has no trail, though a trail along the bottom of the valley to its junction with the East Branch would be a simple matter. Crossing the stream at this point it would zigzag up the hillside to joint the trail from Bear Creek Station, an easy journey from this on. From Bear Creek Station to Glacier House the Railway is followed. A trail might be made along the bottom of Bear Creek Valley to Rogers Pass Station, although it would involve annual repairs, owing to the avalanches from Mts. Macdonald and Tupper. The objection to the railway route is the long line of snow-sheds and the possibility of being caught by trains.

From the point where the proposed trail would join the trail to Bear Creek Station, the traveller has choice of a route to the head of the North Fork of the spillimacheen and so into the Spillimacheen Mountains. At the junction of the Valley of Grizzly Creek with the Valley of the Beaver River, a trail leads for twenty miles beneath the eastern escarpment of the Summit Range of the Selkirks to the head ot the Beaver Valley across the Beaver-Duncan Pass into the Duncan Valley as far as Trout Lake, This is the interesting divide where are the two glaciers, sources of the two rivers, and where on days of heavy melting, waters from the Beaver Glacier may run over into the Duncan River.