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PIONEERING AS A PLEASURE

D

By

W. T. WALSH

RIVEN out by the stuffy atmosphere and the fumes of a smoky oil lamp, we had sought refuge on the top of the caboose. We were entering the valleys of the Rockies, one hundred eighty miles west of Edmonton, Canada, and cool rushes of air as the construction train rounded curves gave indication that we were gaining in altitude. The train was moving at the rate of only eight or ten miles an hour-a speed just sufficient to bring out the creaking of the wheel trucks and the rattling of car couplings. Ahead loomed the Jumbo car, the culinary department of the train-a huge box of incredible breadth which never should have been put on wheels, and which even at the moderate speed we were going threatened, at not infrequent intervals, to roll off the tracks. The degree of the roll of this Jumbo regulated the progress of the train. One hundred track workers were asleep forward in freight cars; the train crew was also asleep. The only watchers aboard as the line of cars crept between the dark mountain passes were the engineer and fireman forward and we two in the rear.

Overhead the stars stuck out big as electric lights. The clear air revealed constellations that the man in the "States"-not even in the mountainsrarely sees. Suddenly the sky was shot with rays of light. They emanated from the north, radiating like a fan. They were the Northern Lights. They leaped and flashed across the heavens for some little time; they played a hundred weird changes; they seemed to challenge; but presently they became dimmer and the very light itself seemed to dissolve and to drift across the sky in a white mist.

With the vanishing of these lights we climbed through the little window back into the caboose and, opening the doors at both ends of the car, heedless of the protests of the train crew who even in their dreams seemed to be alert for any such incursion of fresh air, slept on canvascovered matresses until near dawn.

When we awakened it was shiveringly cold on the rear platform of the caboose, though the time was late August. The cold waters of the Athabasca flowed beside the track but a few yards away. It had that peculiarly steely look that running water on the verge of freezing has, though in reality the temperature could not have been much below fifty degrees.

Our baggage was piled on the rear platform, and there being no room for ourselves, we stood upon the baggage— two suit cases and two enormous flat square bags of canvas, suitable in shape for packing on horses. Now in the dawn we could get a real look at the mountains

sharp slopes scantily covered with trees, up to other sharper slopes, where the trees ceased and the rocks beganrunning sheer for perhaps two or three thousand feet, terminating in a serrated. ridge, so irregular and sharp it seemed as if a mountain goat could not find footing there.

Pyramid Peak-exactly like the handiwork of Titans-had the look as if it had passed through scorching flame—the reddish glow of granite shot with great patches of brown and metallic green. And by way of contrast miles to the left loomed Mt. Geikie, 12,000 feet above sea level, rising in huge snow-covered ledges, these ledges seeming to mark the great gaps in its height, till finally the brow,

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PIONEERING AS A PLEASURE

part tilted from our sight, burst into rose hue. The rising sun had found first the highest mark.

An hour later, the train still creeping along at a snail's pace, we kicked off our baggage and leisurely jumped after. We had arrived at Jasper, located in the new national park of that name recently opened in the Canadian Rockies by the Dominion Government.

That is not the way the ordinary tourist will come to Jasper Park in a few months. The trains de luxe of the Canadian Northern Railway will bring him straight west one thousand miles from Winnipeg via Edmonton right up to the gates of the mountains. At the present time there is no regular hotel. The town itself is a frontier settlement, primitive as such settlements always are, buried in an encompassing circle of mountains.

The Park is a Canadian Government project. Americans who may have been alarmed because they have felt that the great European war is cutting them off from travel, not only on the European continent, but even in the far Eastern seas, will find here a new region for exploration. Jasper is one of the most wonderful of the continent's parks. It is as near to Nature as even the woodsman would care to get. The only roads that lead through the forests, through the valleys, along the edges of precipices, the sides of rushing streams, are the horse trails roughly and hastily hewed by the small force of men that have been employed by the Park superintendent for this pur

pose.

The Park has an area of one thousand one hundred twenty square miles, and is a tumbled mass of rugged of rugged mountain chains and formidable single peaks. Even in summer snow frequently may be seen half way down from the summits, and glaciers press down into the valleys from some of them. There is no really very definite limit to the Park. Where its boundaries terminate no one in the region itself seems exactly to know.

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The location was selected because it formed an advantageous position between British Columbia and the plains to the east of the mountains and because it was so wild, wooded, and irregular that it would not serve the purpose either of tillage or grazing.

One Boston big game hunter, recognizing Jasper as one of the few real frontier posts remaining, the past summer set out from the town with a force of half a dozen men and thirty horses to transport the camp supplies and to carry back the piles of skins and horns he expected to accumulate. Of course this hunting had to be done beyond the border of the Park proper, for as is the custom in our own national parks, the use of firearms is prohibited. In Jasper Park no one is permitted to carry a loaded weapon unless there has first been placed upon it the seal of the game warden.

An equipment of half a dozen horses, a cook, and a guide will take two men through the mountains for a trip lasting from one week to a month. Out of Jasper there are several routes. One of these leads over a bridge that spans the swift-rushing Athabasca River. This is known as the "Maligne Trail" after a river of that name. Through the first few miles of the journey a road that wagons might easily follow leads up to higher altitudes and then this road gradually vanishes, and only the narrow trail that the novice could scarcely find, but which is an open book to the horses, carries one forward.

The guide balanced gracefully on his little cayuse, his hat at a rakish angle, his shoulders swaying easily with his mount's every motion, is followed by the three. pack animals, who crawl under fallen logs, and clamber over rocks-heaven only knows how-while you try to follow close behind.

Then with a sudden turn in the trail, the dust, and the other slight discomforts of the upward journey are forgotten as a vast panorama of country sweeps before the eye. Opposite, three miles away looms Pyramid Peak. At its base stands

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WHERE THE GLACIAL STREAM ON MOUNT ROBSON DIVIDES ITS WATERS BETWEEN THE PACIFIC

AND ARCTIC OCEANS

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