THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS
It was now neck-or-nothing with the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers
picture. Having already been out much longer than we had expected to be,
there were left only provisions for two days. Nixon had suggested making
a hurried trip out and bringing in fresh supplies, but as the time set
by Chester for his arrival for the Big Bend trip was already past, I did
not feel warranted in prolonging the present jaunt any further. If the
morrow was fair all would be well; if not, the main object of our trip
would be defeated.
By great good luck the clear weather held. There was not a cloud
hovering above the mountains at daybreak the following morning, and we
got away for an early start to make the most of our opportunity. Nixon
himself had run and cut out the trail to the Lake earlier in the summer,
but horses had never been taken over it. Though it was extremely steep
in pitches, our maiden passage was marked with few difficulties. Much to
Nixon's surprise and satisfaction, only one big dead-fall had been thrown
down to block the way, and our enforced halt here gave Roos the
opportunity for a very effective "trail shot." He also got some striking
"back-lighting stuff" at spots along the interminable cascade that was
tumbling and bounding beside the trail. The elevation of our camp on the
creek was something like six thousand feet, and that of the Lake of the
Hanging Glaciers a bit under eight thousand. The trail is between three
and four miles long, and we were rather over two hours in making the
climb. There were several halts out of this; steady plugging would do it
much quicker.
Timber-line was passed half a mile below the lake, the last of the trees
being left behind in a wonderful little mountain park studded with
gnarled pines and still bright with late wild flowers. The autumn
colouring here was a marvellous chromatic revel in dull golds and soft,
subdued browns--the shedding tamaracks and the dying meadow grasses.
Clambering on foot up a steep-sided hillock that appeared to be an
ancient glacial moraine augmented by many slides, we suddenly found
ourselves on the edge of the high-water level of the lake. The
transition from the flower-strewn meadow to a region of almost Arctic
frigidity was practically instantaneous--the matter of a half dozen
steps. One moment we were climbing in a cliff-walled valley, with rocky
buttresses and pinnacles soaring for thousands of feet on either side,
and with brown-black gravel and thinning brown-grey bunch grass under
foot and ahead; the next, as we gained the crest of the old terminal
moraine, the landscape opened up with a blinding flash and we were
gazing at a sparkling emerald lake clipped in the embrace of an
amphitheatre of glaciers and eternal snow, and floating full of icebergs
and marble-mottled shadows. The "Hanging Glacier"--perhaps a mile wide
across its face, and rearing a solid wall of ice a couple of hundred
feet in the sheer--closed the further or southeastern end of the lake.
Behind the glacier was a cliff of two thousand feet or more in height.
It appeared to be almost solid ice and snow, but must have been heavily
underlaid with native rock to maintain its abruptness as it did. Higher
still a snow-cap, bright and smooth as polished marble, extended to the
crest of the range and formed a glittering line against the cobalt of
the sky. Of all the scenic gems of the North American continent, I
recall none which is so well entitled to the characterization of
"unique" as this white-flaming little jewel of the high Selkirks.
The lake was now rapidly receding to its winter low-water level, and to
reach its brink we had to press on across three hundred yards of black
boulders which were evidently covered in the time of the late spring
floods. Ordinarily one would have expected the worst kind of rough and
slippery walking here, but, to my great surprise, the great rocks were
set as solid and as level as a pavement of mosaic. The reason for this
became plain when we approached the water, where a flotilla of small
icebergs, rising and falling to the waves kicked up by the brisk breeze
drawing down the lake, were steadily thump-thumping the bottom with dull
heavy blows which could be felt underfoot a hundred yards away. This
natural tamping, going on incessantly during the months of high-water,
was responsible for the surprising smoothness of the rocky waste
uncovered by the winter recession. The great boulders had literally been
hammered flat.
The icebergs, which were formed by the cracking off of the face of the
great glacier filled half of the lake. They varied in size from almost
totally submerged chunks a few feet in diameter to huge floating islands
of several hundred. They were of the most fantastic shapes, especially
those which had been longest adrift and therefore most exposed to the
capricious action of the sun. By and large, the effect was that of a
Gargantuan bowl sprinkled with puffy white popcorn. But if one took his
time and searched carefully enough there were very few things of heaven
or earth that were not represented in the amazing collection. One berg,
floating on another, had been reduced by the sun to the seeming of a
gigantic view camera--box, bellows and lens. A number of famous groups
of statuary were there, but of course very much in the rough. "The
Thinker" was perhaps the best of these, but even Rodin would have wanted
to do a bit more "finishing" on the glacial cave-man humped up on his
icy green pedestal. Roos, who had never heard of Rodin, said it reminded
him of me drying out after my shower-bath in the ice-cave. His facile
imagination also discovered something else. He had once seen a picture
of "Lohengrin's Farewell" in a Victrola record price-list, and there was
a much sun-licked hunk of ice, very near the shore, which suggested the
barge to him, swans and all. I saw the barge all right, but the Pegasus
of my imagination had to have some spurring before he would take the
"swan" hurdle.
[Illustration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS]
[Illustration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS, TAKEN FROM THE ICE WALLS, LOOKING
NORTH]
It was Roos' idea that I should swim off, clamber over the side of the
barge, lassoo the "near" swan with a piece of pack-rope to represent
reins, and let him shoot me as "Lohengrin." It wouldn't exactly run
into the "continuity" of the "sportsman" picture, he admitted; but he
thought that Chester might use it, with a lot of other odds and ends,
under some such title as "Queer People in Queer Places." The idea
appealed to me strongly. "Lohengrin's Farewell" had always moved me
strangely; and here was a chance actually to appear in the classic role!
"You bet I'll do it," I assented readily. "What shall I wear?" The
"Shining Armour," which we both seemed to connect with "Lohengrin,"
happened to be one of the things not brought up in our saddle-bags that
morning. We were in a hot discussion as to the best manner of
improvising a helmet and cuirass out of condensed milk and sardine tins,
when Nixon, asking if we knew that the sun only shone about three hours
a day in that "_geesly_ crack in the hills," dryly opined that we should
take our pictures of the lake while there was plenty of light. That
sounded sensible, and we started feverishly to hurry through with the
routine grind so as to be free to do proper justice to "Lohengrin." As
Fate would have it, however, that which was presently revealed to me of
the ways of fresh-water icebergs quenched effectually my desire to swim
off and take liberties with the capricious things at close quarters.
After making a number of scenic shots, Roos announced that he was ready
to go ahead with the "falling iceberg" stuff. As it was quite out of the
question making our way along the base of the cliffs on either side of
the lake to the face of the glacier in the limited time at our disposal,
and, moreover, as we had already demonstrated the impossibility of
making artificial icebergs with "sixty per" dynamite, it became
necessary to improvise something closer at hand. It was Roos' idea that
a piece of cliff cracked off into the lake might produce the effect
desired, especially if "cut" with discrimination. "Here's the way it
goes," he explained. "The cracked off rock plunks down into the lake
right into the middle of a bunch of floating icebergs. I starts cranking
at the splash, and with the bergs all rolling about and bumping into
each other no one can tell but what it was one of them that really
started it. Then I'll pick you up hopping up and down on the bank and
registering 'surprise' and 'consternation'; and then follow with a
close-up of you standing on that high rock, looking down on the quieting
waves with folded arms. Now you register 'relief' and finally a sort of
'awed wonder.' Then you take a big breath and raise your eyes to the
face of the glacier. You keep right on registering 'awed wonder' (only
more intense) and as I fade you out you shake your head slowly as if the
mighty mysteries of Nature were beyond your understanding. Get me? They
ought to colour the film for that dark blue in the laboratory (I could
tell 'em just the solution to make that ice look cold), and the
sub-title ought to be 'The Birth of an Iceberg,' and...."
"Jim's the midwife, is he?" I cut in. "Yes, I get you. Tell him to
uncork some of that 'sixty per' 'Twilight Sleep' of his and I'll stand
by for the christening."
After a careful technical examination of the terrain, Jim, chief "Powder
Monkey," located what he thought was a favourable spot for operations
and started to enlarge a thin crack in the cliff to make it take five
sticks of dynamite. That was more than half of our remaining stock; but
Roos was insisting on a big iceberg, and plenty of powder was the best
way to insure success. It must have been the tamping that was at the
bottom of the trouble, for moss and damp earth are hardly solid enough
to deflect the kick of the dynamite in the desired direction. At any
rate, although there was a roaring detonation, the mighty force released
was expended outward rather than inward. The face of the cliff hardly
shivered, and only an inconsiderable trickle of broken rocks and sand
slid down into the lake. Too sore to take more than hostile notice of
Nixon's somewhat rough and ready little _mot_ about the "'Birth o' the
Iceberg' turning out a _geesly_ miscarriage," Roos clapped the cap over
his lens, unscrewed the crank and began taking his camera off its
tripod. That rather hasty action was responsible for his missing by a
hair what I am certain was the greatest opportunity ever presented to a
moving picture operator to film one of the most stupendous of Nature's
manifestations.
The roar of the detonating dynamite reverberated for half a minute or
more among the cliffs and peaks, and it was just after the last roll had
died out that a renewed rumble caused me to direct a searching gaze to
the great wall of ice and snow that towered above the farther end of the
lake. For an instant I could not believe my eyes. It could not be
possible that the whole mountainside was toppling over! And yet that was
decidedly the effect at a first glance. From the rim of the snow-cap
down to the back of the glacier--a mile wide and two thousand feet
high--there was one solid, unbroken Niagara of glittering, coruscant ice
and snow. Like a curtain strung with diamonds and pearls and opals it
streamed, while the shower of flaming colours was reflected in the
quivering waters of the lake in fluttering scarves of sun-shot scarlet,
in tenuous ribbons of lavender, jade and primrose. It was only when the
last shreds of this marvellous banner had ceased to stream (at the end
of thirty or forty seconds perhaps) that I saw what it was that had
caused it. The whole hair-poised brink of the great snow-cap--sharply
jolted, doubtless, by the explosion of the dynamite--had cracked away
and precipitated itself to the glacier level, nearly half a mile below.
The shock to the latter appeared to have had the effect of jarring it
sufficiently to crack down great blocks all along its face. The glacier
had, in fact, been shocked into giving birth to a whole litter of real
icebergs where, nearer at hand, we had failed dismally in our efforts to
incubate even an artificial one. As glacial obstetricians it appeared
that we still had much to learn.
Roos made a great effort to get his camera set up again in time to make
it record something of the wonderful spectacle. He was just too late,
however. Only a few thin trickles of snow were streaking the face of the
cliff when he finally swung his powerful tele-photo lens upon it, and
even these had ceased before he had found his focus. It was no end of a
pity. I saw several of the great _valangas_ started by the Austrian and
Italian artillery in the Dolomites, and, previous to that, what I had
thought were very considerable slides on Aconcagua and Chimborazi, in
the Andes, and on Kinchinjunga and among the hanging ice-fields above
the Zoji-la in the Himalayas. But any half dozen of the greatest of
these would have been lost in that mighty avalanche of ice and snow that
we saw descend above the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Nixon, with a
lifetime spent in the Selkirks and Rockies, said he had never seen
anything to compare with it.
Jim, reporting that he still had three sticks of dynamite in hand, said
he reckoned there might be a better chance of starting an "iceberg" on
the southern side of the lake than on the northern one, where we had
failed to accomplish anything. The southern slope was even more
precipitous than the northern, he pointed out, and he had his eye on a
rock which looked as if a charge might turn it over and start it
rolling. "You never can tell what you may be startin' among a bunch o'
tiltin' rocks like them 'uns," he said hopefully. Nixon's muttered "That
ain't no _geesly_ hooch dream" might have meant several things; but I
took it that he intended to imply that there was too much "unstable
equilibrium" along that southern shore to make it the sort of a place
that a neurasthenic would seek out for a rest cure. I felt the same way
about it, only more so; but Roos' disappointment over what he had
already missed was so keen that neither of us had the heart to interpose
any objections when he told Jim to go ahead and see what he could do. As
two sticks of dynamite were already promised to Harmon, the trick, if it
came off, would have to be pulled with one. Spitting tobacco juice on
the taffy-like cylinder for luck, Jim clambered off up the cliff and
planted it under his "likely rock," Roos meantime setting up in a
favourable position below.
[Illustration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
THE FACE OF THE HANGING GLACIER]
[Illustration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
WHERE MY PARTY FOREGATHERED WITH HARMON'S ON THE SHORE OF THE LAKE OF
THE HANGING GLACIER]
Whether Jim's "tobaccanalian libation" had anything to do with it or
not, this time luck was with us. The sharp blast kicked Jim's rock up on
one ear, where it teetered for a second or two indecisively before
rolling over sidewise and coming down kerplump on a huge twenty-ton cube
of basalt that no one would have thought of moving with a barrel of
giant. It wasn't so much what the little rock did as the way it did it.
The big block gave a sort of a quiver, much as a man awakening from a
doze would stretch his arms and yawn, and when it quivered a lot of
loose stuff slipped away from beneath and just let it go. It lumbered
along at an easy roll for a bit, and then increased its speed and
started jumping. Its first jump was no more than a nervous little hop
that served to hurdle it clear of a length of flat ledge that reached
out to stop its downward progress. A second later it had hit its stride,
so that when it struck the water there had been nothing but rarefied air
trying to stop it for two hundred feet. Down it went, pushing a column
of compressed _aqua pura_ ahead of it and sucking a big black hole along
in its wake. It was when that column of compressed water spouted up
again and tried to chase its tail down the hole it had come out of that
things began to happen, for it found something like a dozen fat icebergs
crowding in and trying to insinuate their translucent bulks into the
same opening. And of course they made a tremendous fuss about it. When
an iceberg found that it couldn't get in standing up, it forthwith
lay down on its side, or even rolled over on its back; which didn't help
it in the least after all, for the very good reason that all the other
icebergs were adopting the same tactics. And so Roos, who was cranking
steadily all the time, got his "Birth of an Iceberg" picture after all.
When the bergs ceased butting their heads off against each other Roos
shot me in the scenes where I registered "consternation," "relief" and
"awed wonder," and our hard-striven-for Lake of the Hanging Glaciers
picture was complete. There was just a bit of a hitch at the "awed
wonder" fade-out, though, but that was Roos' fault in trying to
introduce a "human touch" by trying to make Gordon's dog perch up beside
me on the crest of a hatchet-edged rock. The pup sat quietly wagging his
tail until the moment came for me to lift up mine eyes unto the hills
and increase the tenseness of my "awed wonder" registration. Then the
altitude began to affect his nerves and he started doing figure "8's"
back and forth between my precariously planted feet. As a natural
consequence, when Roos started in on his "fade-out" I was seesawing my
arms wildly to maintain my balance, talking volubly, and
registering--well, what would a temperamental movie star be registering
while in the act of telling a dog and a man what he thought of them for
their joint responsibility in all but pitching him off a
twenty-foot-high rock into a vortex of tumbling icebergs? Again (unless
this part of the film has been discreetly cut in the studio before
exhibition) I beg the indulgence of lip-readers.
The lake was deeply shadowed before we were finally at liberty to take
up again the sartorics of "Lohengrin"; but it was not that fact, nor yet
the not entirely prohibitive difficulty of making shining armour out of
tin cans, that nipped that classic conception in the bud. Rather it was
the astonishing unstable-mindedness displayed by the bergs when impinged
upon from without. Of the hundred or more hunks of floating ice within a
five-hundred-yard radius of the point where our artificial berg had hit
the water, only a half dozen or so of the broadest and flattest
continued to expose the same profiles they had presented before the big
splash. Most of the others had turned over and over repeatedly, and one,
which seemed to "hang" in almost perfect balance, continued slowly
revolving like a patent churn. "Lohengrin's Barge," half a mile distant
from the heart of the "birth splash" and lapped by but the lightest of
expiring waves, was rolling drunkenly to port and starboard as though in
the trough of the seas of a typhoon. It looked ready to turn turtle at a
touch, and there were too many angular projections on it--especially
about the "swans"--to make even a man who aspired to grand opera care to
court lightly the experience of tangling himself up in the wreck.
Descending to the timber-line meadow where the horses had been left, we
found Harmon had brought up his outfit and pitched his tent midway of an
enchanting vista framed in green-black pines and golden tamaracks, and
with a wonderful background for "camp shots" both up and down the
valley. There he was going to make his base, he said, until he found
just the light he wanted on the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Then he
hoped to get at least a negative or two that would do something
approaching justice to so inspiring a subject. And there, working and
waiting patiently through an almost unbroken succession of storms that
raged in the high Selkirks for many days, he held on until he got what
he wanted. It was in that quiet persistent way that he had been
photographing the mountains of the Canadian West for many years, and it
will be in that way that he will continue until he shall have attained
somewhere near to the high goal he has set for his life's work--a
complete photographic record of the Rockies and Selkirks. It is a
privilege to have met an artist who works with so fine a spirit, who has
set himself so high an ideal. A number of Harmon's scenic pictures of
the mountains where the Columbia takes its rise are so much better than
the best of my own of the same subjects, that I am giving them place in
a work which it was my original intention to illustrate entirely myself.
We returned to our camp at the head of Horse Thief Creek that night, and
set out on our return to Windermere the following morning. Save for a
rather sloppy passage of the main ford, the journey was without
incident. With light packs, we pushed right through to the head of the
wagon-road--something over thirty miles--the first day. The seventeen
miles to Invermere we covered in a leisurely fashion, reaching the hotel
at three in the afternoon of the following day, Sunday, the twentieth of
September. Here I found a wire from Chester, stating that it had
finally proved impossible for him to get away from business, and asking
me to go ahead and see the Big Bend trip through without him. In the
event I decided to continue on down the river he would be glad to have
his cameraman accompany me as long as the weather and light were
favourable for his work. A letter with full instructions covering the
two pictures he desired made had already been dispatched.