Westward from Banff the main range of the Rockies is crossed at an elevation of fifty-three hundred feet, the Continental Divide. The Bow River Valley is followed up to Mount Stephen, which is encircled to the northward. This splendid duomo-like mountain rises thirteen thousand two hundred feet, being named after George Stephen, Lord Mountstephen, the first president of the railway. In approaching, there are passed scores of towering snow-clad peaks. At Laggan, among them, at more than six thousand feet elevation, are three gems of the mountains, the Lakes of the Clouds--Louise, Mirror and Agnes. At the summit of the pass a rustic signboard bears the words "The Great Divide," marking the backbone of the Continent, whence tiny rills flow alongside the railway in both directions, a little brook leading eastward down to the Bow, whose waters go out to Hudson Bay and the Atlantic, while to the westward another diminutive stream is the head of Wapta River, flowing into the Columbia and thence to the Pacific. Three pretty green lakes start the Wapta or Kicking Horse River, its northern branch coming from a huge glacier nine miles long, and its volume expanding from a hundred cascades and brooks tumbling down from the snowbanks and ice-fields all about. Then it crosses the flat floor of a deep valley, which soon develops into a series of terrific gorges, as with rapids and cataracts the stream suddenly drops into an abyss and foams and roars deep down in an impressive canyon. The railway repeatedly crosses this stupendous chasm in getting down the Kicking Horse Pass, giving grand views of high mountains all around, and after a scene of true alpine magnificence it comes out at the broad valley of the Columbia. This river goes northward between the Rockies and the Selkirks, the next western range, and turning westward penetrates them and flows southward on their western flanks into the United States.