On the roof of the Rockies : the great Columbia icefield of the Canadian Rockies

Front matter

Books by LEWIS R. FREEMAN

IN THE TRACKS OF THE TRADES Down THE COLUMBIA Down THE YELLOWSTONE

‘THe Cortorapo RIvER

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE fees AND. AND THE OUTPIT .. °°. 38. Oe a

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[ix]

Chapter I The Land And The Outfit

IT is a strange fact that one of the first regions of the Canadian Rockies to be visited by a white explorer was also one of the last to be scientifically explored and comprehensively photographed. ‘This is the land of tall peaks and glacier choked valleys about the head of the Athabaska, where is found what may fairly be rated as the most striking Alpine scenery of the Western Hemisphere.

David Thompson, the eminent astronomer-explorer of the Northwest Company, who was later to run the Astors so close a race for the establishment of the first fur-trading post on the Pacific coast of what is now Oregon, crossed the continental divide during the first decade of the nineteenth century by following the Whirlpool branch of the Athabaska to its head and descending to the Big Bend of the Columbia by a stream he named the Portage River and which is now called the Wood. The trail thus blazed by Thompson later became the main transcontinental route of the Hudson’s Bay traders between the great Canadian plains and their posts on the upper and lower Columbia. The waters of “The Achilles of Rivers,” swift and turbulent but still navigable for well handled bateaux, were available for the voyageurs to run or to breast for the thousand miles or more below Boat Encampment at the northern apex of the Big Bend.

Thus it chanced that a thin but fairly steady stream of travel flowed back and forth across the continental divide at the head of the Athabaska during the half century or more that the remainder of the extensive area covered by the Canadian Rockies was rarely visited by white men. It was doubtless for this reason that the narrow zone of mountains immediately under the eye of the traveller was elevated to a prominence somewhat beyond its due. Explorers and pioneers of all time have been wont to stress the wonders of what they have discovered or seen and to discount those of the regions beyond their ken.

Conservative geographer that he usually was, David Thompson estimated the height of the two peaks flanking Athabaska Pass to north and south as 18,000 feet. This was arrived at by figuring the summit of the pass as 11,000 feet according to the boiling point of water, and the tops of the peaks as 7,000 feet above the pass. David Douglas, the Scotch botanist who in 1827 named the two peaks in question Mount Brown and Mount Hooker, respectively, perpetuated Thompson’s error as to height, and furthermore characterized them as the two highest peaks yet known on the continent of North America. Travellers by the old Hudson’s Bay trail, unduly impressed by the twin sentinels of Athabaska Pass after their long traverses of the level plains, kept alive the early overestimates of height. School geographies studied by many people now living listed Mount Brown and Mount Hooker as the highest peaks in North America. As a matter of fact, of course, neither peak is greatly in excess of the 11,000 feet of Thompson’s original estimate of the altitude of Athabaska Pass. ‘There must be several hundred higher peaks on the continent, and two or three with summits nearly 10,000 feet in excess of the altitudes of Brown and Hooker.

Intent almost solely on finding the lowest passes and the easiest routes of travel the early traders and trappers must have been almost if not quite ignorant of the existence, but a few miles to the south, of what has since been proven to be the most extensive icefield on the continent outside of the arctic and subarctic regions of the far north. ‘They were under the very drip of the eaves of this great continental ice-shed when they tried to establish a new route to the Columbia by the Chaba branch of the Athabaska and the silver gorge of beautiful Fortress Lake which sits on the divide and drains both ways. When they failed here to find a better pass than that by the historic “Punchbowl,” at the head of the Whirlpool, where the Hudson’s Bay factors were wont to rendezvous and transact the business of the East and the West in lurid week-long carousals, the glittering ice-caps gleaming green against the skyline to the south must have told them that there was no use venturing farther toward the heads of the two main forks of the Athabaska. With lines of lofty peaks whose heads were rarely clear of crowns of clinging clouds, and with every mountain valley pouring down its frigid finger of glacier from a mighty mother icefield far above, they did not need to explore further to know that here was a barrier more formidable than any they had encountered to the northward. ‘They were well advised to seek no farther in this direction. With the complete topographical data of the present day no better route could be found for the traveller by foot and by boat between Hudson’s Bay and the Pacific than that blazed by the early trappers and traders. And, moreover, not to this day has a practicable way ever been found from the western drainage of the Columbia Icefield to the Columbia River, rumbling in its cliff-walled gorge six to seven thousand feet below.

The later and more extended explorations of the latter half of the nineteenth century avoided the Columbia Icefield region for the same reason as had those of the trappers and traders—passes were sought for, not barriers. Railways needed lower passes and easier approaches than had footmen and pack-trains, while a cliffy gorge like that of the upper Columbia where it loops round the Big Bend was an obstacle rather than a help. For these reasons the surveyors of the transcontinental lines found that the most favourable natural routes lay far away from the lofty ice-capped plateau where three of the greatest rivers of the north took their rise. So the Canadian Pacific blasted its way through the Rockies and Selkirks from eighty to a hundred miles south of the Columbia Icefield, while the Grand Trunk—later the Canadian National—found a lower and easier route as far to the north. The careful studies for neither line added little if any knowledge of the still untrodden heights of the cold ice-locked terra incognita between.

On account of the difficulties and dangers attendant upon travelling with pack-trail in regions scarred by torrential mountain streams and exposed to the threat of slides of snow and rock, with swamps and stretches of treacherous glacial mud in the valleys, the first trails opened up in the Canadian Rockies for the benefit of the hunter and the camper were confined to the safer and more readily attainable regions near the railways. Mountain climbers, seeking for a vantage from which to attack the unscaled heights of the continental divide, were forced to cut their own trails through the standing and fallen timber and to scramble over rocks and slides as best they could above the line of vegetation. Much or all of such a trail might never be used again. Keen and trained observers for the most part, these courageous and indefatigable Alpinists added more to the knowledge of the high Canadian Rockies during the first two decades of the present century than accrued from organized scientific exploration. Their work was fragmentary and uncoordinated, however, and it was not until the late Interprovincial Survey completed its labours along the continental divide between Alberta and British Columbia that definite and dependable data of this hitherto almost unknown region finally became available.

Among many valuable geographical and topographical facts revealed by the work of the Interprovincial Survey, perhaps nothing was received, even by those who knew the Canadian Rockies, with so much surprise and interest as the statement that the Columbia Icefield, formerly not known by name to one in a hundred thousand, had an area in excess of 150 square miles. Perhaps of even greater appeal to the imagination was the revelation of the hitherto little appreciated fact that drainage from this single icefield flowed to three major oceans— that it was almost certainly the only instance in the world where such great dispersion of water from a common source occurred.

The Columbia Icefield may be roughly likened to a stockily built octopus, with the main mer de glace forming the body and the creeping, down-crawling glaciers the tenacles. Completely surrounded by peaks varying in height from 10,000 to over 12,000 feet, the icefield itself is comparatively smooth and level, many square miles of its centre, indeed, being not more rolling than an undulating plain. The average elevation, exclusive of the tentacles of glacier which extend down not far from the 6,000-foot contour, is about 8,500 feet above sea-level. Its greatest elevation is a hummock of 8,884 feet somewhat north of its centre. Here, at a point not clearly defined to the eye but probably of very small area, occurs the remarkable three-way split of the continental drainage. Where the tip inclines westerly, the water runs by the Bush to the Columbia and thence to the Pacific. ‘The meltage from the northerly slope may run to either of the main branches of the Athabaska, and so on to the Great Slave Lake and down the Mackenzie to the Arctic. The east and south slopes drain to separate branches of the Saskatchewan which, uniting twenty-five miles below, ultimately mingle with the brine of the Atlantic in Hudson’s Bay.

Striking scenically, unique topographically, and barely explored, the Columbia Icefield has few rivals in the world to-day in its attractions not only for the alpinist but the lover of the out-of-doors as well. The present article is a plain workaday account of the first attempt to make a comprehensive collection of photographs—moving and still—of this wild and wonderful region. I shall hardly need to add that all of the best of the story will have to be told by the pictures.

Even from the days when the carrying and operation of the cumbersome wet-plate outfits presented almost prohibitive problems of transport, the camera has played a prominent and increasingly important part in passing on to the older world the record of a new found land. The explorer photographs as he goes, but, handicapped by haste and the limitations of transport in a wilderness, almost always hurriedly and taking things as they come. The surveyor, when his time comes, works more carefully but only in the narrowly restricted field bounded by topography and perhaps geology. The last to come but the longest to stay is the artist—the nature photographer. He, like the settler who follows Kipling’s “Explorer,” “remains to occupy.”

Unlike the explorer or the surveyor, the nature photographer cannot block out a region on the map and say, “When I have covered this area my work is complete.” He can cover all of Nature’s subjects but never reach the end of her moods. And the recording of moods—the savagery of the mountain torrent which grinds down and engulfs the tongue of forest that blocks its way; the perversity of the peak that hides its head in a veil of cloud—is his most subtle vehicle of expression.

A life-span is all too short for the artist who would picture, either with brush or camera, a land or a race. Curtis has given the best of many decades to photographing the passing Indian of the Northwest, as has Carl Moon to his record of those of the Southwest. The magnificent photographic record of Yellowstone Park, started fifty years ago by F. Jay Haynes, is being added to to-day by his son Jack. Byron Harmon’s successful expedition to photograph the Columbia Icefield last summer and fall is the crowning achievement of twenty years spent picturing the Canadian Rockies, but it does not mark the end of the work.

Long familiar with Byron Harmon’s fine studies of the Canadian Rockies, my first personal meeting with him was late in the summer of 1920. This was at a camp on the iceberg-battered shores of that incomparable mountain gem, the Lake of the Hanging Glacier, where I had journeyed by pack-train preliminary to pushing off on a boating voyage which was to carry me practically the whole length of the Columbia. In my log of that voyage I find this meeting recorded in the following entry:

“Descending to the timber-line meadow where the horses had been left, we found Byron Harmon had brought up his outfit and pitched camp midway of an enchanting vista framed in green-black pines and golden larch, with a wonderful background for ‘camp-shots’ both up and down the valley. There he was going to make his base, he said, until he found just the light that was needed to set off the Lake of the Hanging Glacier. Then he hoped to get at least one or two negatives that would do something approaching justice to so inspiring a subject. And there, working and waiting patiently through an almost unbroken succession of storms that raged in the high Selkirks for many days, he held on until he got what he wanted. It was in that quiet, patient, persistent way that he had been photographing the mountains of the Canadian West for many years, and it will be just in that way that he will continue until he shall have attained somewhere near to the high goal he has set for his life-work—a complete photographic record of the Rockies and Selkirks. Itisa privilege to have met an artist who works with so fine a spirit, who has set himself so high an ideal.”

Something of his work—what he had done and what he still hoped to do—Harmon told me in the forty-eight hours we were snowbound together in the first storm of the early closing winter. ‘That was his sixteenth year in the Canadian mountains, he said, and in this time he made winter and summer photographs of most of the outstanding peaks, glaciers and valleys of the Selkirks and Rockies. In four years more he hoped to have photographed them all, and then, in the light of what he had learned, he would start in and do them all over again —try to do them better.

It was on this occasion that I first heard of the Columbia Icefield. Harmon had never seen it himself, but had heard enough of it from mountain climbers who had made ascents within sight of it to rate the region as probably the finest scenically in all the Rockies. Because it was remote and difficult to reach, he was saving it for the last—the summer of his twentieth year of photographing in the Rockies. With a properly equipped expedition, and by taking plenty of time, he hoped to be able to cover all of region along the continental divide where he would not have hitherto worked with his cameras.

Early in the spring of 1924 Harmon wrote to tell me that he had managed to maintain his photographic schedule during the preceding three years, and that there now remained only the Columbia Icefield region to picture to complete his original program for the Rockies. This he hoped to do during the coming summer and fall. Preliminary organization of the expedition was already under way, and he was writing to ask me to come along and help make the moving picture film. With a jaunt of my own already planned, which contemplated driving a

[t23 te small motorboat from Chicago to New York by way of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, some rearrangement of schedules was necessary to make both trips possible. Ultimately, by hard and steady pushing through the stormiest early summer the Great Lakes have known in many years, I was able to dock in New York in time to swing back to Canada and arrive at Banff by the rsth of August. The pack-train was already assembled at a camp on the Bow near Lake Louise, and there we joined it the following day.

Roughly speaking, the route laid out in advance called for following the Bow River to the lake and glacier of the same name at the continental divide, thence paralleling the divide as closely as topography would permit until the Columbia Icefield was reached at the head of Castleguard Valley. After a month of work on or near the icefield, including the crossing of one spur of it with the pack-train and the circling round to the head of the Athabaska, under Mount Columbia, on its northern side, winter clothes and supplies would be picked up at Jasper and the return journey of two hundred miles to Banff made by the best available route through the early snows. It was expected that from ten to twelve weeks would be necessary to complete this itinerary. Enforced bid waits for favourable picture weather and the fact that nothing worthy of the name of trail would be available for more than inconsiderable sections was responsible for allowing what may seem like an undue amount of time to cover a total distance of not much over 500 miles.

Two features of the proposed itinerary as explained before departure impressed me—so far as my own experience of pack-train travel went, that is —as verging closely upon the impossible. These were the plan to take the horses across the icefield and the expectation of travelling for two or three weeks of the return journey through a region of high elevation, where not only the passes, but many of the valleys as well, would be deep in snow. As to the icefield traverse, I was told that such a crossing had been safely made the previous summer by the pack-train of a mountain climbing party and that there was therefore no reason to believe it could not be done again, especially as one of our packers had been with the pioneer outfit. As for the long snow journey, Harmon thought the rigours of it worth facing for the fact that neither moving pictures nor stills had been previously made of such a winter passage over the high Rockies. It would probably be attended with some losses, and it was quite possible we would have to turn back or follow one of the easterly valleys out to the plains; but, with all of the horses habituated to pawing for grass on the winter ranges, the chance was worth taking.

With every reason to expect that the trip both going and returning—the former on account of high water and ice, and the latter on account of heavy snows—would prove one of the most severe ever attempted by a pack-train in the Canadian Rockies, great care had been taken that the outfit, both as to personnel, stock and equipment, should be the very best that could be assembled. With years of personal acquaintance among the guides and packers of the Rockies, Harmon had picked the three men best suited to the special needs of the expedition. ‘These were informed in advance of the plans and itinerary, and warned that the picture work would inevitably be responsible for delays, difficulties and discomforts not usually encountered on the regular hunting and camping trips. ‘They were all mountain men of long experience, and one of them, La Casse, was well acquainted with the region to be traversed as far as the Columbia Icefield and on to the Athabaska Glacier and Wilcox Pass.

The horses, picked long in advance, had been kept off the trail all summer to conserve their strength for the arduous and punishing work ahead. This was a most fortunate circumstance, for the long weeks of semi-starvations in the snows of the early winter, with endless hours of desperate floundering in the deep snows of the high passes, demanded all their stored up stamina to bring them through.

The photographic outfit was complete in every respect. Besides the moving-picture camera, with its varied assortment of lenses, Harmon and I had each two still cameras. ‘There was 8,000 feet of moving-picture film, with as much roll and cut film for the other cameras as there was any possible chance of using. The moving-picture film and my own roll films were carried in sealed tins. Harmon’s huge reserve of cut films, by some oversight, was sent in ordinary wrappings, a fact which was responsible for much anxiety in the days of mud and high water.

The only real weakness in the outfit was its lack of water-tight boxes and bags. The pack-boxes in which the moving-picture camera and its accessories were catried furnished adequate protection from the blows of rocks and trees but would not exclude water. Neither would any of the grub-boxes nor the sackings of the food supplies. As a consequence, when we were shortly confronted by unexpectedly se-

HARMON AND HIS MOVING PICTURE CAMERA ON FORTRESS LAKE

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff BAPTIE AND FREEMAN SUNNING THE CARRIER PIGEONS vere high water, we lost more supplies in two days than the recent Geological Survey expedition lost in its three months’ voyage through the rapids of the Grand Canyon. Even at that, however, we were never seriously handicapped by a shortage either of food or photographic supplies.

With luxuries cut to the bone as a consequence of the fact that no replenishment of supplies would be possible inside of six or eight weeks, our only real frills were the radio and its satellites, the carrier pigeons and the typewriter. The little portable Radiola was my own idea, born of the memory of the real entertainment the Grand Canyon party had had from a similar outfit a year previously. After getting the best technical advice available on the possibilities and limitations of radio under the conditions we could expect to encounter, J had bought the set in New York and brought it on to Banff. Here we had a pack-box hastily built around the little black case and the block of batteries connected up for us by the local electrician.

The carrier pigeons were Harmon’s idea. He had been breeding homers at Banff for a year or two but had never had a chance to try them out in the mountains. The present opportunity was too good to be missed. Besides, there was always the chance that we would be glad of means of getting out word by air in the event communication along the surface of the earth became impracticable. The birds would also prove a useful medium for reporting on radio conditions, several powerful stations having promised to make special efforts to reach us in the event the Rockies area did not prove entirely “dead,” as there had been some reason to believe.

Neither Harmon nor myself knew any more about carrier pigeon technique than we did of that of radio. About all we could learn locally was from an old children’s bird book, which informed that the door of the cote should be of valve-like construction, permitting the ingress of the returning bird but not the egress. Also that the boxes in which the pigeons were carried should be provided with holes large enough to admit plenty of air but not so large as to allow the birds to escape before their time. Both of these admonitions seemed quite reasonable. Less convincing was the instruction that the message should be written on waterproof oiled paper and wrapped securely to one of the bird’s tail feathers. As the only line I had on this particular point was the somewhat hazy memory of the picture on a childhood valentine of a dove with a very plump packet dangling from its neck, I was somewhat diffident about disputing the practicability of the tail-feather plan. A self-constituted local pigeon expert told us a number of other esoteric practices to follow, but as the most probable of these had to do with taking along a fragment of the home roost for the bird to smell before being launched on its return flight, we did not give them serious consideration.

We did lay in a stock of oiled paper, however, on the theory that it might better resist the disintegration of possible fogs or rains. Fortunately we tried it out before starting, and so learned that even the softest pencil point would skid along on the polished surface without leaving the vestige of a mark. And that was why my little folding Corona was requisitioned to fill the breach at the last moment. A sharply struck key left an impression on the tough, smooth paper which resisted blurring even under the hard rubbing of a moist finger-tip.

Chapter II

DRIVING over from Banff to Lake Louise railway station toward noonday of August 16th, Harmon and I found our camp in the willows by the Bow occupied only a dozen hungry pack-horses tethered among piles of hastily dumped gear. Evidently a cog of a wheel of our well-oiled plans had slipped. What the trouble was transpired an hour later when “Soapy” Smith, owner of the outfit and head-packer, rode in to announce, in language more picturesque than polite, that two of his horses were missing and that he feared they were back-tracking it to their natives ranges in the eastern foothills. Rob, the wrangler, and “Ulus,” the cook, were trying to trail the fugitives, but unless they came back within the hour a start that day was out of the question. Harmon, cheerily philosophical, replied that it would suit him just as well to get under way in the morning and suggested a drive up the mountain to Lake Louise to fill in the interval.

An irate packer telling the world and a considerable portion of the adjacent solar system just what he thinks of the ancestry of his strayed cayuses is not exactly at his best, from a polite and refined standpoint, that is. And yet my first impression of our head-packer was unmixedly favourable. Spectacled and with the long drooping moustaches of a moving picture sheriff, one of his friends had described old ‘“‘Soapy” to me as a cross between Theodore Roosevelt and a bull walrus. It was my instinctive feeling that the man who was to guide our material destinies for the next three months combined many of the best elements of both of these virile prototypes that inclined me instantly in his favor. ‘Too, I liked the technique of his profanity—words winged with fire but flowing with the easy, effortless inevitability of the spinning of the turbine of an ocean liner. Free natural swearing meant a well driven, well treated pack-train. One of Nature’s own swearers is also one of Nature’s own gentlemen. That truth had been driven home to me through years of experience. [ have never known a packer who swore freely and naturally to beat a horse cruelly. Yes, I took to old “Soapy” Smith at once, even though his name had been borrowed bodily from a notorious gambler and confidence man who had won what was pretty nearly my last dollar on the ‘“‘pea-and-walnut” trick in

Skagway the week before he was shot by a Klondiker from whom he had lifted a cool ten thousand.

It was nearly dark before Rob and “Ulus,” tired but undispirited after their bootless search, straggled back into camp. This again proved good stuff. A man who can return with a smile after twelve hours spent in trying to pick up the tracks of strayed horses is only a little lower than the angels.

Rob Baptie was a typical Canadian Rockies wrangler. lLithe, slender, quick on his feet and with a fine bridle hand, he already had made a name for himself in the local round-ups. The horse was his alpha and omega, the mainspring of his existence, the shimmer on the wings of his dreams. He could ride right down the line of the string of a passing trail outfit, call every animal by name, and tell you just what caused the rope burn on the off hind fetlock of the little flea-bitten roan straggling in the rear. He could no more keep his eyes from roving over a fine bit of horseflesh than a Broadway “Johnny” can prevent his optics from pricking a dotted line to the ankles of a passing chorus girl. All of which went to prove that Rob, like “‘Soapy,” was of the kind that could get a lot out of a pack-train without mistreating it.

Ulysses La Casse, commonly called “The Frog”

because he was of French-Canadian parentage, was the all-round man of the party. Popularly credited with being the best camp-cook in the Canadian Rockies, and also quite competent as a packer and wrangler as well as a guide, hunter and climber, “Ulus” was fitted to “pinch-hit” in emergency in any department of the game. He was also the only man in the party with previous firsthand knowledge of the Columbia Icefield, having been to and across the eastern side of it the year before with the Torrington mountain-climbing expedition.

With time hanging on our hands that evening after an early supper at the little hotel near the station the occasion seemed opportune for a preliminary try-out of the radio. In spite of the discouraging pronouncements of experts in Chicago, New York and Montreal, who had declared that the region of the Canadian Rockies was almost certainly a “dead” area, I had high hopes of what we were going to do with that shiny little black box o’ tricks. Nor was I given pause by the fact that neither myself nor anyone else in the party knew much more about radio than we did of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. What was the use of knowing anything about ite Had not our party of comparative novices of the Grand Canyon Survey expedition given the first definite answer to the popularly and even technically accepted theory that radio could not be received in a deep sheer-walled gorge? And now we would confound the experts again by demonstrating that the eastern wall of the Rockies did not present an insuperable barrier to the passage of the winged ethereal wave. ‘To be sure my relations with the radio set carried through the Grand Canyon had been confined to stowing the stout yellow box containing it in the forward compartment of my boat and doing my best to keep it from being dumped out into a rapid. But I had watched to see how the ether was coaxed into giving up its secrets and felt quite confident that I could become a perfectly good coaxer myself now that I had a set of my own.