Travel Letters: Canadian Rockies, Hiking + Painting

{Top centre: "3"} {Centre aligned, printed letter head: "LAKE O'HARA CHALET-BUNGALOW CAMP HECTOR B.C."} {Left aligned just above hand written letter, printed: "............193"} up and put it in boiling water and then with some bovril which is concentrated beef extract it made delicious soup. vitone? is very good. Its almost like coaco. Comes in a powder of chocolate malt I guess it is, and you just add that to hot water too. We had tea as well. [?] sugar for that and then we had milk {crossed out below the word milk: "cream"} in both powdered and liquid condensed forms. The [kli..] powder we never opened and the other we had an awful time using up and finally ended by drinking it today. Next time I don't think we will bothrr taking it. We found we had plenty to eat by having bread, bacon, honey etc or vitone? for breakfast. tea, soup, or vitone? for lunch with bully beef bread and honey and the same for supper and as everything tastes twice as good out doors we thought we fared? very well.

{Left of written text, pencil:"X"} To go with all this, the first afternoon we reached Larch Valley, which is above Moraine Lake and opposite the ten Peaks, in an hours climb from the camp. It is mostly up hill in fact a pretty steady climb! We found a nice place to camp right near a creek with plenty of fire wood. The higher up you are the fewer mosquitoes (if the wind blows) and there are always enough dead trees which found existance at timber line? a little too hard

4 a struggle. The tent worked well and gave plenty of room for Pete and me with our belongings as well. We hung the food up on these poles in case some gophers or other animals decided to sample it and Vic picked a nice rock to sleep on as he said it would be "so nice and flat". He evidently didn't mind the hardness. It began to cloud up quite early so we didn't try to sketch that night. However I don't remember that it rained at all.

The next day I was so sleepy I couldn't keep awake in the morning. Wevhad a good 10 to 12 hours sleep but the combination of a hot sun and the altitude were too much for me and I actually slept for over an hour before lunch. Pete made two sketches and then after lunch we decided to go further up the Valley to a ridge where there was still quite a bit of snow being? from a big cornice which had been formed last winter. It was a few hundred feet above our first camp and really as high as the trees grow there. It was a lovely spot a ridge on one side dropping down to the glacier which melts into Moraine Lake and all Ten Peaks stretched out in a row in front of us. On the other side was Larch Valley with several creeks of running water a little lake, Eiffel and Pinacle Peak on one side & Sentinel Pass between Pinnicle and Temple and then to the west east the Bow Valley and Castle Mountain. We loved

{Centre aligned} 5 {Centre aligned, printed in blue} LAKE O'HARA CHALET-BUNGALOW CAMP {Centre aligned, printed in blue} HECTOR, B.C. it so much up there that we decided to move {printed above line of text: '.........................193'} camp. Victor had gone down to Moraine in the morning for the extra food but he managed to move all camp in two trips while Pete & I made a sketch. You would have thought that we had the place to ourselves but we saw two people walking up towards sentinel pass and then late in the afternoon Chris and a lady climber came over the pass and seeing our smoke yohoed? and we could watch them all the way. Vie went down the ridge to see who they were and found they were to climb Pinnacle mountain next day.

The Ridge proved one of the finest places to camp of all. Vie is terribly willing and didn't mind at all going down for water for the creek was just below us about two or three hundred feet and it was steep enough to throw a stone into the water below. As we lay in our tent we could watch the sunrise and see the color of the sunset and there was only a little group of trees directly in front of the tent and it looked as if we were on the edge of a cliff for you couldn't see the ground directly in front. The wind blew pretty hard except when it was dark which in summer is only a few hours but the mosquitoes weren't so bad.

We had very good weather and though the sun was hot still it was lovely with a cool breeze. We watched Chris and his fat lady

6 tourist most of the way up Pinnicle and we could see them standing on top and they even yelled to us though it was quite a way off. After lunch we thought we would go to the top of Sentinel Pass and look over into Larch Valley we saw Chris and the lady start down and watched them until it was too late to go up Sentinel. We asked them to come & have a cup of tea with us but the fat lady (she was fat too) didn't think she could climb the ridge and as a storm seemed to be coming up we went back just in time to get the food under cover. After a very brief shower we were sketching when Dan McCowan, the lecturer, suddenly appeared over the ridge from the Moraine Valley with a camera all opened ready to snap pictures and a small pack. He was anxious to get a certain picture before the next storm came over and so he couldn't stop either. All he said was that people came to Banff, went into the Hot Springs, took the Tunnel Mountain drive and saw the Buffalo and thought they had seen the mountains. Its true too, of most people. It rained several times that evening, thunder storms but we didnt seem to get the worst of any of them.

Next morning having gone to bed before eight we managed to get up at seven. We had breakfast & packed up and started for Wenchemna? Pass over which we were to go then across Prospectors Valley and over Opabian Pass to the meadows above O'Hara. We cut down from the ridge until we reached the trail below and from there it was mostly a walk until we reached the foot of the pass where a lot of

{Centre aligned} 7 {Centre aligned, printed in blue} LAKE O'HARA CHALET-BUNGALOW CAMP {Centre aligned, printed in blue} HECTOR, B.C. {Left aligned, printed in blue: '..............193'} switch backs took us up quite easily. There were several patches of snow we had to cross but it wasn't a hard climb and we only rested once or twice. Going down the ridge we suprised four lovely dear who bounded away down the hill into the trees. It was interesting to think that deer will go down a mountain for safety where as goats or sheep would go up.

It was so windy on top of the Pass that we couldn't really stay and sketch and going down the other side was pretty hard work on the legs. It was what is called scree all loose rock which slides with you. With an ice axe you can sometimes break yourself, but with packs it was harder keeping your balance. It was quite a long way down about 20 minutes of it and when we reached the bottom we had our lunch of sandwiches & chocolate and an orange. We had to climb again though quite gradually up Opabin?. There was a large glacier to walk over but the snow wasn't deep enough to make it hard. It was cloudy most all day but lovely looking down from the Pass towards O'Hara. It was funny to see on the ice all sorts of bugs, evidently blown there by high winds, also goat tracks. We slid down the snow on the other side which was fun. You can almost skate in it. After we got down off the glacier we did a good deal of wandering about not knowing quite where to camp. Its really an old stamping ground