SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 30, 23 July 1903, Page 3

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

XIII — AMONQ THE ROCK-RIBBED HILLS

By the Editor. The last instalment of travel left us at Yale, on the Fraser River, 103 miles from Vancouver. 1 Thus far into the howls of the land Had we marched on without impediment.' Up to this point we had been scudding along over the flat or rolling delta of the Fraser. It is broad— life* the end of a wedge— below in the rich green flats or polders where dykes confine its stream and where the sluggish flood finds its way by many channels into the Strait of Georgia. As we sped on our way the mountains crowded in on each flank, until at \ale the valley tapered to a poi^t and stopped short before a vast rampart of rock. Yale stands, like a Swiss village, upon the bench or terrace over the river. But the brief illusion of a Swiss scene is shattered by a gaudy Joss-house that betokens the presence of full many a slant-eyed, pig-tailed son of the Hwa-Kwo or Flowery Kingdom in the neighborhood besides the placid groups that scooped the wash-dirt and 1 rocked the cradle • for gold in the sandy river bars below. For we were now on the rocky frontier of the gold-land of British Columbia. The first intimation of the fact was the unexpected sight of A Gold Dredge of New Zealand pattern— and probably of Dunedin build— high and dry on the sands of the Fraser close to Mission City. Forty years ago Yale was the golden gate of this golden land, the starting point of the perilous wagon-road that led the adventurous digger to the famous mining-fields of Cariboo. Yale was a stirring place in those days. But forty years are as much an epoch in the great Canadian West as a cycle in Cathay. The days of the wagon-teams, the days of the gold-fever in Yale are as the times of the Barmecides. The wagon-road— the engineering triumph of the early sixties— has, for a hundred miles, fallen to pieces into the Fraser ; miner and tourist are whirled along near its track in fast express trains ; the gold-fe^er has left Yale, and the town sleeps by the rushing river and dreams as though it had opium in its veins. It was a lazy, sunny day as we passed the dozing little town. A little flat-bottomed steamer leaned reposefully against the wharf. It was the last direct reminder of the salt sea that we met until we touched the Great Lakes 1800 miles away to the east. And so at Yale we bade adieu to the Pacific and felt that we were far into the bowels of the land— into the depths of the region of snow-topped mountain and ice-field and spreading lake and tumbling alpine waterfall and rushing river. It is a glorious journey of 600 miles through the successive ranges that come like the billows of a stormy sea and are collectively known, in common speech, as the Rocky Mountains. There are really four conjoined chains or cortltlleras. The greatest are those on the eastern and western flanks. The first are the Rockies properly so called ; they overlook the green, rolling prairies of Canada's great North-West. The Cascade) Ranges form the westernmost barrier, and bathe their feet in the waters of the Pacific. Squeezed in between these broad ramparts are the tumultuous and far-extending cones of the Columbia and Selkirk Ranges. This vast region of craggy peaks forms the rugged backbone of the American continent. Southward it struggles away towards the buffeted rocks of Cape Horn, ailTi northward the broken lines of peaks, crowned with their^ diadems of snow, run loosely in long wormy columns, diminishing as they go, till at last they dip their diminishing forms into the frozen waters of the Arctic Ocean. The name ' Rocky Mountains ' was well chosen. ' There probably exists nowhere else, 1 says a recent writer, ' such an extensive region of Naked Rock almost entirely devoid of vegetation.' The whole of this vast region was, in a comparatively recent geological age, in the throes and turmoil of violent volcanic activity. In places the stratified rocks have been covered with a blanket of lava several thousand feet deep. According to Ruskin, mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery. There is a revelry of them, and of every beautiful and fantastic form, in the ' humpy, bumpy, lumpy ' land between Vancouver and the foothills at Calgary. Volcanic eruptions and the erosive action of rain and wind and flowing water* have made it a region of naked crags, towering cliffs, icy cones, stupendous pinnacles, broken battlements, sudden gorges, rifted canyons ; and the carved and fretted rocks are decked with a brilliancy of coloring which, though less delicate, is not less admirable than the soft Belleek-ware tints that seize the fancy's eager eye in the famous • shawls ' of the Jenolan

Caves in New South Wales. There is, indeed, a glorious wealth of coloring in the Canadian Rockies. Out on the Pacific waters a group of us watched the snow on Mount Olympia as, in the yellow sunset of an April day, it turned to the tint of old ivory and faded into a soft blush as of ' opening roses in the lily's bed.' But sunset in the wild heart of the Rockies is, like that in the Lakeland of New Zealand, Something to Remember. ' The snow glory,' says the Marquis of Lome, ' changes to deep purple at the base, and then, in successive waves of deep blue, pink-grey, and yellow-green, each shade is blended until at your feet you see the steel blue of the impetuous stream.' The artist Whympcr stalked and climbed and sketched in the Canadian Rockies till he caught the feeling of the place. Then went back to the crowded streets and busy haunts of men once more. But the fascination of the mountains was upon him. In his dreams he saw the white ramparts in their robes of cloud and the valleys in their soft purple shadows ; the mountains were calling to him, and he took up his palette and his alpenstock and gun and again and yet again buried himself in these noble solitudes that seem to bring man closer to his Creator. The Canadian Pacific Railway crosses the backbone of the American continent at an elevation of 1500 feet below any line further south. This secures the passengers a double advantage : it reduces to a minimum the difficulties arising from snow-blockades, which are rare, even during the winter months ; and it affords the traveller those stupendous views of high mountain scenery along what is claimed to be, for its scenic beauty, the most attractive railway route in the world. But space presses, and another paper must tell what we saw as we sped eastward from Yale along the wild gorge of Hell Gate in the Cascade Mountains. (To be continued.)