Far above the explorers’ heads was Roche à Miette—an imposing, sphinx-like head with a swelling Elizabethan ruff of sandstone and shales. To the east the party saw a cluster of mineral springs, two of which boil out of a mountain side in a wild secluded little valley, and have a temperature of 116 degrees.
Farther on they saw Mount Geikie towering inaccessible, its summit lost in azure at a height of 11,000 feet. To the south-east lay Simpson’s Pass, in which the mighty Athabasca is born in a region of perpetual snow and a succession of glaciers. Within that pass is the “Committee’s Punch Bowl,” whereof Sir George Simpson has written: “The relative position of the opposite waters is such as to have hardly a correlative on the earth’s surface, for a small lake sends its tribute from one end to the Columbia and from the other to the Mackenzie.”
Presently they arrived in sight of Mount Robson, the King of the Rockies, which had been recently scaled by the Rev. G. R. B. Kinney, of the Alpine Club of Canada. Impressions of that eminence must be given in the words of its hero. “The first party of white men (of which I was one),” says Mr. Kinney, “ever known to reach Mount Robson was organised by Dr. Coleman, of Toronto University. . . . Our first camp was in the deep shades of the cedar and hemlock on the Grand Forks, within a mile of where the branch coming in from around the north of the mountain joins the one from around the south. Because of my roving disposition, I became the explorer of the party, and my first discovery was that of the beautiful lake that bears my name. Nestling at the very foot of Mount Robson on the west, walled in on every side by majestic glacier-bearing peaks, this forest-fringed emerald gem, sentinelled by the highest and grandest mountain in all the Rockies, will rival Lake Louise for splendour. The feeling of being the first white man known to walk its shores, and looking for the first time on the glories of its brand-new wonders, filled me with a sense of awe.”
The party failed to climb Mount Robson in 1907, so they returned to the task in the following summer, when again their efforts were unavailing.
Hearing in 1909 that an American party were about to seek the coveted prize, Mr. Kinney got together a pack train of three horses and three months’ provisions, “and left Edmonton alone to capture the mountain, hoping to pick up a companion on the trail.” At the place where he swam his horses across the Athabasca, he fell in with Donald Phillips, a young Ontario guide, and enlisted his companionship. They worried their packs to an altitude of about 10,700 feet, where they succeeded in making a bed on a snow-covered shelf. “For hundreds of miles,” says Mr. Kinney, “the peaks lay at our feet. Scores of miles of the Fraser valley lay open below us like a map, and the mighty Fraser was but a tiny, crooked thread of silver. Then the valleys disappeared, and we were alone with the stars and the snow-white peaks and the grinding avalanches.