Mollie Adams Diary of her Journey in the Canadian Rockies August 4, 1908

Salt Lick Camp.

Tuesday, Aug. 4.

               Started at 8.30, travelled 6 hrs. and covered probably 6 miles.  We went along pretty well till we came to the canyon, perhaps 4 miles below Salt Lick Camp.  The falls and canyon are quite fine.  We were on the lookout for it, and at a slight turn of the river saw a cloud of spray rising like a miniature Niagara, It is a good deal like the falls at the lower Su-Wapta canyon, but a much greater volume of water, or course, and there is some great pothole work going on below.  The gorge is very narrow for a few hundred yds. below the falls, cut up the dip in quartzite and conglomerate.  The first drop of the falls is probably about 60 ft. and the gorge not more than 30 to 40 ft. wide.  The river continues to be in a broader canyon as far as we went, and as far as we can see plainly ahead.  When we left the falls, the trail got away from us, and we backed and filled among all kinds of bad timber, matchstick (young burnt pines, 1 to 2 inches in diameter strewed thickly everywhere like jackstraws), prevailing with everything else.  The sandflies were very bad in the intervals of waiting, sometime the pack would move in a slow procession around and over small trees and bushes to scrape the flies off.  U. made a little smudge for them at one place, and old Frank as usual got the front seat, and stayed with it till he was coughing with the smoke, would have singed his eyelashes off, only it has been done already.  Presently we came to a tributary creek – also in a canyon – this was about 11.30 A. M.  A little before 1.30 P.M. we had advanced a few yards and were across the little canyon, having slid down one side and gone up the other with a jump and a bounce by a wonderful trail W. cut out while we waited, after they had run up and down stream a few miles.  Another slight advance through matchstick etc., then we came bang up against another difficult piece of navigation.  A series of rock ridges formed by the outcropping quartzite conglomerate.  The dip was about 20° s.e. and we were going n.w., so it meant climbing up the slopes and dropping off the other side.  As W. said, we might be there till dark, trying to wriggle the horses through if we did not have the trail, so he went off to find it, or bust – and did shortly, and we did not let it get away from us again.  But for anything dignified by the name of trail, it takes the cake.  Over the rock ridges we had many steep flights of stairs to go down, each step one to two ft. high, the rock well glaciated and smooth for the horses to slip on, and many windings back and forth.  Then we had a piece of very bad “matchstick”.  Then both together.  The horses tumbled along somehow without breaking any legs, and at 2.30, still no prairie nor the mouth of the Whirlpool River in sight, we camped on an open hillside quite high above the river, with a slough behind us.  We had a good view both up and down the river, and up the Whirlpool valley.  Great consulting and criticising of maps and reports, as usual.  I was able to spot the Miette valley, with the field glasses, by the geology of it as described by McEvoy.  An. 4100 ft.  Heavy clouds all day.