Among the Canadian AlpsBurpee, Lawrence J. (Lawrence Johnstone)
History
Among the Canadian Alps
Burpee, Lawrence J. (Lawrence Johnstone)
Canadian Rockies (B.C. and Alta.)
Our tent has been spoken of, but it was more properly a tepee--not the
tepee that you see in pictures of Indian life, made of skins neatly
sewn together and perhaps ornamented with rude drawings--but a modern
compromise, of the old Indian form but made of strong cotton. Some of
the guides in the mountains much prefer the tepee to the tent in any
of its familiar forms. Others will have none of it. Our own
experience led us to the conclusion that the tepee is without a
rival in a good tepee country, that is one where suitable tepee poles
are abundant, but there are occasions when you have to camp in a
district where poles are as hard to find as needles in a haystack, and
the resources of the language seem ludicrously inadequate as you limp
about the camp in an ever-widening circle hunting for something that
will support the thrice-damnable tepee for the night.
If you are fortunate enough to find a sufficient number of long,
straight, slender poles among the fallen timber (in the parks you are
not permitted to cut down trees for the purpose), it is a matter of
but a very few minutes to stack them in position, stretch the cotton
over the frame, and lace the front with a handful of small twigs,
leaving an opening at the top. Then you make the beds around the
circle, and build your camp fire in the middle. On a cold night, and
particularly on a cold, rainy night, one blesses the Indian who first
invented the tepee. Instead of shivering outside around a fire that
will not burn, you have your fire with you in a large roomy tent, and
can cook your meals and eat them in comfort. And who that has
experienced it can forget the evening around the tepee fire, resting
tired bodies on luxurious beds, smoking the pipe of peace, and
swapping yarns until it is time to roll up in the thick, warm Hudson
Bay blankets and sleep until dawn, or until the smell of frying bacon
awakens one to another day's adventures.
This morning on the hillside overlooking the Maligne Valley proved to
be a Red Letter day in our calendar. The sun had been rather unkind
since we left Jasper, but now as we scrambled out of the tepee, we
looked up into a cloudless sky. Far below a noisy little creek hailed
us cheerily as it hurried down from the mountains to join the Maligne.
In the distance we had glimpses of the river itself, and beyond uprose
an extraordinary wall of rock a thousand feet or more in height,
shutting in the valley and running on one side toward Maligne Lake and
on the other far off into the hazy distance toward the Athabaska.
Our plans were to climb up the valley to Maligne Lake, take advantage
of the kindly sun to secure a few pictures, and then make our way back
to last night's camp and down the valley to Medicine Lake. East of
Medicine Lake we had heard of a wonderful little body of water called
Jack Lake, famous not so much because of its beauty as for the
extraordinary abundance of its trout.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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