The silent forests, through which one sometimes has to march for days together, are not so dense, and the trees are not so large on the eastern side of the Divide as on the western, that is to say, in the valleys leading to the Columbia river.
In the valley of the Columbia itself, down which we travelled in 1900 from Donald to the Bush river, for several days we hardly saw the sky. The vast forest far surpassed in size anything we had seen on the other side of the range--huge pines, cotton-wood trees, firs, and spruces reaching to a height of 150 feet or more. The undergrowth too was very dense--cedar, white maple, and alder (near the streams), were found; whilst the fallen trunks of dead trees, sometimes six or eight feet in diameter, lay scattered with others of lesser size in every kind of position. Some in their fall had been arrested by others, and were waiting for the first gale to bring them crashing to the ground; whilst at the will of every breeze that wandered through the upper branches of the higher trees, these half-fallen monarchs of the forest would break the heavy stillness of the air by their complaints and groans against their more sturdy brethren for thus preventing them lying at peace upon the moss-covered ground below. Others that had lain perhaps scores of years in the wet underbush had decayed and rotted, leaving rich masses of decomposing vegetation, from which trees had sprung that in their turn also must fall and suffer the same change. There is a marvellous fascination about these quiet shady fastnesses of the western valleys. As one wanders day after day through this underworld, cut off from the glaring sun of noonday and the blue sky, hardly a sound breaks the stillness, whilst all around the ruin of ancient woods lies piled with a lavishness most absolute--that of Nature's self, the tangled wreck of a lifetime, the luxuriant growth of centuries.
It is in these western valleys that the rainfall is far greater than on the other side of the range, hence the forests are thicker and the muskegs and streams more dangerous. Only in the western valleys also is found that pest of British Columbia forests, the Devil's Club--a plant with large, broad leaves and a stem covered with spikes. Amongst the moist undergrowth it grows to a height of from five to six feet, trailing its stems in every direction and emitting a dank, unwholesome smell. Woe betide any one who with bare hand should roughly seize one of those stems, for the spikes enter the flesh, and, breaking off, produce poisoned wounds which fester. But whilst cutting trail it is impossible to prevent the long, twisted roots flying up occasionally, leaving their detestable thorns in all parts of one's body.