A week after, when within a couple of days of the fort, on that "small but abominable river" the Ah-hel-dessy from Artillery Lake, Back discovered the Anderson Falls. Toiling along over the mountains, every man with a seventy-five-pound package on his back, he had not proceeded more than six or seven miles when, observing the spray rising from another fall, he was induced to visit it and was well consoled for having left the boat behind. "From the only point," says Back, "at which the greater part of it was visible, we could distinguish the river coming sharp round a rock, and falling into an upper basin almost concealed by intervening rocks; whence it broke in one vast sheet into a chasm between four and five hundred feet deep, yet in appearance so narrow that we fancied we could almost step across it. Out of this the spray rose in misty columns several hundred feet above our heads; but as it was impossible to see the main fall from the side on which we were, in the following spring I paid a second visit to it, approaching from the western bank. The road to it, which I then traversed in snow-shoes, was fatiguing in the extreme, and scarcely less dangerous; for, to say nothing of the steep ascents, fissures in the rocks, and deep snow in the valleys, we had sometimes to creep along the narrow shelves of precipices slippery with the frozen mist that fell on them. But it was a sight that well repaid any risk. My first impression was of a strong resemblance to an iceberg in Smeerenberg Harbour, Spitsbergen. The whole face of the rocks forming the chasm was entirely coated with blue, green, and white ice, in thousands of pendent icicles; and there were, moreover, caverns, fissures, and overhanging ledges in all imaginable varieties of form, so curious and beautiful as to surpass anything of which I had ever heard or read. The immediate approaches were extremely hazardous, nor could we obtain a perfect view of the lower fall, in consequence of the projection of the western cliffs. At the lowest position we were able to attain, we were still more than a hundred feet above the level of the river beneath; and this, instead of being narrow enough to step across, as it had seemed from the opposite heights, was found to be at least two hundred feet wide. The colour of the water varied from a very light to a very dark green; and the spray, which spread a dimness above, was thrown up in clouds of light grey. Niagara, Wilberforce Falls on Hood River, the falls of Kakabikka near Lake Superior, the Swiss or Italian falls—although they may each charm the eye with dread—are not to be compared to this for splendour of effect. It was the most imposing spectacle I had ever witnessed; and, as its berg-like appearance brought to mind associations of another scene, I bestowed upon it the name of our celebrated navigator, Sir Edward Parry, and called it Parry's Falls."