Towards the top of McKinnon's Pass, the mossy path becomes a stony track, winding on and up among Alpine flowers--white gentians and ourisias growing side by side with tall white or yellow mountain daisies. Then the track leads through brown tufts of snow grass, while almost at the summit you again find tarns of quiet brown water, in whose depths snowy mountains are reflected.
Here we breathed invigorating mountain air, and had a clear view of the mountains which before we had only partially seen through a fretwork of green. The top of the pass is more than three thousand feet above sea level--a narrow, rocky saddle blocking the head of the Clinton Cañon, and on the opposite side giving access to the valley of the Arthur River. Around the saddle are rugged peaks, rising to a height of five to seven thousand feet; some bare, others piled thickly with snow: and as we watched, avalanches came thundering down from one of the glaciers into the valley beneath. We could see the whole of the Clinton Cañon up which we had walked--a narrow valley, only half a mile wide, shut in by precipitous walls of four to seven thousand feet. Their rugged summits were all rock and snow; below they were clothed with dense forests reaching down to the valley, where the river wound in and out among the dark trees like a thread of light green ribbon.
Looking down the Arthur valley, which is much wider than the Clinton, we again looked over miles of forest backed by other rocky heights.
Below the pass, nine miles from Pompolona, are the Quinton Huts, our next resting place.
Near these are the Sutherland Falls, said to be the highest waterfall in the world, falling in three gigantic leaps from a height of nearly two thousand feet. They come roaring down over the steep hillside--a mighty volume of water ever thundering on brown rock fringed with luxuriant forest growth, and scattering showers of spray over the trees and over the grassy knoll on which you stand to watch them. They were only discovered in 1880, by a man named Sutherland, a settler from Scotland in the early days, who had a fancy for exploring.
At Quinton's we met another large party on their way back, and that night the huts were overcrowded: we were eleven ladies, with only nine bunks, so two slept in the dining-room. Next morning we all contrived to dress in perfect good temper; no one dreamed of making a trouble about anything, and it might have been excusable, as there was comfortable floor space for two, not for eleven; we had one small washstand, a small, square mirror hung on the wall for our only looking-glass, and a bench to serve as table and chair.