Pollough Pogue's cabin at the abandoned Nasmyth millsite, 1925. Pogue is on the far left wearing the woolen toque.
(Eilif Haxthow Collection)
Hollyburn Mountain (1924 - 1926)
Articles by Pollough Pogue
Winter Sports
Pollough Pogue
"The Province" December 5, 1924
All good Canadians feel the romance in snowshoes. There are certain things which belong to Canadian outdoor life whose very names have a colorful suggestion, such as canoes, dog teams, snowshoes. The sight of a pair of Canadian snowshoes is a stimulant to imagination, suggesting winter forests, camps in the snow, trappers and the peltry trade, coureurs de bois in blanket capotes and scarlet sashes, fur country and Indians running behind long toboggans drawn by dog trains on the snow-crust.
The light wood frames of a variety of graceful shapes, strung with netted rawhide, have the trim beauty of birch bark canoes, toboggans and other characteristics specimens of Canadian Indian handicraft. There is a wild pictorial quality about these forest things. The snowshoe, like the birchbark canoe, has a delicate and almost unsubstantial look, though both are stoutly made.
There isn't a good Canadian who hasn't felt the glamour of canoes, cross sticks and snowshoes. Even as far back as Canadian outdoor sport traditions run, snowshoes have been linked romantically with winter sport.
There was stirring colour in the processional tramps of snowshoe clubs that are now to me vivid memories of sharp winters in Eastern Canada. The electricity of the frost charged tone's body until healthy nerves and muscles tingled with the stinging life of the arctic air. In this soft climate we have a needless fear of the cold. The moonlight had made the snow country a charmed fantastic land. The long file of snowshoe walker's wound over the white hills, their torch's tinting the snow with the orange. They wore the costume of Canadian tradition, and no more colourful garments were ever worn. The scarlet-trimmed white blanket coat with its scarlet-lined capuchin, the tassetted toque, the fringed sash of the voyageur, the gay leggings, the yellow deerskin moccasins, make up a costume that makes a theatrical appeal to one's sense of the picturesque. It really is the Canadian national dress.
Snowshoeing is not an organized winter pastime here as it is in eastern cities. At first sight it might seem that there is no snow available, but the plateaux of the mountains on the North Shore and Burrard Inlet afford natural advantages for winter sports of every variety. The high meadows on Hollyburn Ridge provide miles of level space, and the Hollyburn plateau has snow slopes exactly suitable for toboggan slides and ski jumps. The temperatures on these plateaux are much more moderate than winter temperatures in Eastern Canada, and the mountain forests and alpine meadows trimmed with snow are more romantic and beautiful than any winter scenery in the East.
To encourage winter sports on the Hollyburn Ridge but one thing is needed, a suitable cabin with accommodations for a number of persons.
Hollyburn affords winter scenery in fairylike perfection of white beauty. It is not very difficult of access: three hours' easy hiking takes the snowshoer or skywalker to the plateau from Dundarave. Although there is no regular stopping place on the ridge, there are several shacks on the trail, one or two with stoves, in which one may spend the night without discomfort, if one has blankets and food.
Snowshoe Tracks
Pollough Pogue
"The Province" December 15, 1924
The rugged trees on the high lake-gemmed plateau of Mount Hollyburn are wrapped in snow like Carmelite friars in white capotes.
They stand grave and silent-looking over frozen lakes and meadows spread deep with snow which was immaculate, like a blank page until we printed tracks of our snowshoes over it the other day.
When we unwrapped our lunch at the cabin at the first lake two plump ash-gray birds with darker wings and tails and charcoal napes fluttered silently up and perched on the branches near us. Soon they drifted down as casually and noiselessly as falling leaves, upon the snow closer to us. We welcomed the whiskeyjacks and fed them liberally. They were the familiar spirits of the place. There was something elfin about their soundless, voiceless presence.
The third Lake, with its fringe of snow-coated trees, looked like a stage set for some wintry northern drama. I looked for the dramatis personae in the shapes of frosty dwarfs and giants of boreal fairy lore to appear from the trees and begin acting their parts upon the wide stage.
The wind moving among the snow-fleeced boughs made weird music like an elfland orchestra, but the only player who entered while we waited was in the guise of a rabbit. He hopped furtively out upon the empty stage and faced his audience, but evidently he had forgotten his lines. He moved his head from side to side nervously, as if listening for the prompter's whisper. But in a few moments he turned tail and made his exit in a panic. No other players appeared, and we followed the characteristic trail of the perturbed actor. But soon the hind-feet-ahead tracks led to an impenetrable thicket.
The Winter Trail
Pollough Pogue
"The Province" January 5, 1925
The ragged creek spun the downhill, bidding noisy defiance to the frost. The cold had tried to cement it over but had been able to do no more than build cornices of blue green ice out from the rocks on either side of the unfettered stream. The edges of these shells of ice were ground thin as knife blades by the flying water. The creek bragged to me of its freedom as I filled our tea pail.
For lunch we devoured fat bacon and bread buttered with bacon grease scraped from the frying pan with a sheath-knife. This is a class of nourishment that would not beguile your languid appetite in town. But after a three hour hike uphill you find it appetizing, and there isn't enough of it to satisfy. The stewed tea would be noxious if you weren't 3,000 feet up in the snow and creaking cold.
The cold up there obtruded itself upon you. You could not to disregard it. One of us split an opportune dry Cypress log and built up the fire. The flames licked eagerly at the wood, humming. The fire presently made a rich spot of rosie orange colour against massed green-blue pine-boughs, white-trimmed with snow.
We warned are freezing fingers and toes at the blaze. My own feet, wrapped in three pairs of stockings and oil-tanned-shoepacks, were as cold as stones. The afternoon was somber in the thick timber, and the frost intenser, perhaps, than we expected. When the blood began to circulate again in my hands, I whimsically carved my name on a green tree, and underneath it what I once saw on a birch tree on the Ottawa River beneath a Quebec' river-driver's French cabin:
"A passe ici," and the date.
As we started on the back track the cold grew more sinister and the gloomy woods more forlorn. A not long deferred nirvana would be the fate of one who, alone in this frigid forest, became incapacitated by accident, so that he would not move or kindle a fire. Wild nature has no kindly feelings towards man.
The early December evening was descending as we came out into the open space of the old sawmill yard. The feeble sun swung low in a tawny sky above a silver-grey sea edged with pale blue mountains. Apprehensive of being overtaken by darkness on the trail, one of our party urged us to a quicker downhill pace by repeating, exactly in the long drawn whine of the northern dog driver, the characteristic "mushon, mushon, boy" used on snow-covered trails to remind team-dogs of the need for haste.
Frozen Traps
Pollough Pogue
“The Province” March 15, 1925
In the Cypress Lake country, work Eilif and Bill, my companions at the ski camp have their marten line, it rains, snows and freezes alternately; the weather is quite mild or quite cold in a series of quick successional turns. It is the worst kind of weather for hiking or trapping. The snow usually is very wet: and when there is a crust it is too thin to carry a man on snowshoes or skis. The snow depth is now considerable, and the hiker, though he may be expert in the use of snowshoes or skis, as Bill and Eilif are, rolls and flounders in the soft, wet snow, and his snowshoe filling gets as wet as jelly or pulp, and the weight of the snowshoes loaded with watery snow almost pulls his legs out of him, as Bill expresses it.
Skis cut deep into the mushy snow. But without snowshoes or skis the hikers would have to struggle through the snow waist deep, which would be worse.
The week crossed this not help much. It softens almost as soon as it forms. If we had a week of frost, the crust would get solid. But a cold night is almost invariably followed by a mild day with rain.
So the toes of the snowshoes dig under the thin crust which breaks beneath the frames, and if you are not prepared for the toe catching under the rotten crust, you will be tripped and have a tumble. This is not pleasant when you have a pack on your back.
Our snowshoes are made with almost flat frames. They should have the frames curved upward at the bow, in a sheer like that of the canoe, or an up-curve like that of a toboggan. Then they wouldn’t dig under the breaking crest.
A lot of snowshoes are made that way by Indians and white woodsmen who know how to make their own frames and fill them. Before next winter I want to make a pair of long narrow shoes with upturned toes.
The snow shoes made in the factories, or “tailor-made,” as woodsmen say, are not made with the bow bent up. The frames are almost flat.
The alternation of rain and snow by quick turns makes a lot of trouble for the trapper.
Eilif and Bill set their traps near where they have seen the fresh track of a marten or other fur animal. They hair-trigger their traps, that is, when they have fixed in its notch the little dog that is operated by the pan to spring the trap, they work at it delicately with a stick until it is just barely entered. The slightest pressure on the pan will spring the trap.
They then built over the trap, and in closing that on three sides, a little cabin of brush and bark. From the roof of this they hang a bluejay by the feet, so that his head dangles above the pan of the trap.
But it is always possible that after such a careful set has been made, that snow will blow and sift in over the trap, that the snow will be followed by rain, and that there will then be a hard frost.
This freezes the mechanism of the trap. Then an animal can enter the trap house and devour the bluejay at leisure and without risk.
This has happened a number of times. Eilif has had the thrill of following a marten track which led him straight towards one of his traps. The marten had entered the trap house and eaten the blue jay. The animal had stood on the (unsprung?) pan of the trap and (had eaten everything?) but the tail and wing feathers and the feet.
The working parts of the trap were, of course, firmly frozen.
The Wet Camp
Pollough Pogue
“The Province” March 25, 1925
On a rainy day, two weeks ago, I found myself a homeless man. I was driven, by the inescapable seasonal chronology of circumstances, from the dwelling which had served as my winter shelter; house-rents, in the watering place in which I dwell, rose, with the arrival of the robin, to their summer altitude.
I had the means of camping-out in my possession, tent and blankets and a few indispensable iktahs of equipment. I decided to camp-out. Campsites are far from free in the neighborhood of the village; I wanted a free campsite, with a clear stream and some other merits which few rented-campgrounds have. The slope of Black Mountain, clothed up to the 500 foot level with alders already spreading canopies of lavender to declare the spring renewal, and above that sweep of delicate color, with conifers rising in success of bluish tiers and flights, invited my Gypsy spirit.
For four days, in the quiet continuing rain, I back-packed my camp iktahs up the trail, making many trips. I had chosen a campground in a little flat beside a noisy creek at the 1,500-foot level, just below the snow-line. When you climb a mountain trail in March you return to winter, passing again through months that to the comfortable citizens in houses at sea-level are happily past. It was balmy spring on the beach; at 1,500 feet the rain changed to wet snow. It was late February there; January was higher up but sent down a chill. The trail was steep; the packs heavy; I was weak from illness, but the great peace of the mountain forests quieted my spirits. Camp was made in the rain. Poles were cut and peeled. The tent was stretched. A decayed lumber flume supplied planks for floor and box-like bunk. This was filled with overlapped “boughed-up” hemlock and balsam boughs. The ground-cloth was laid on the matted branches; the blankets were spread. The sheet-iron stove was set up. By making a number of deep saw-cuts in a big cedar log peltried with moss, and slabbing off the pieces, I obtained dry wood short enough for the small heater.
While the last of the work of making camp was accomplished (not forgetting to tie some coloured rags to the nearby trees to scare away the evil spirits), there was what to my unhoping resignation as to the weather, seemed a singularly incredible diminution of the rain or sleet. There came an unhoped for, hardly believable suffusion of warm light in the western sky. Presently the ashen clouds shrank slowly back and disclosed an area of soft blue like a sudden view of heaven. This widened, and the low, infrequent sun appeared and sent a sudden radiance into the little open space where stood my wet camp. My chilly sidehill flat, sodden and dripping trees and salal were flooded with gold, and shone like a field of paradise. The miasma of sardonic pessimism cleared away from my soul. A varied thrush uttered and repeated its musical shriek, a song-sparrow whistled its silver prelude, the ventriloquial booming of a grouse began apparently close at hand. The myriad magenta fruit of the alders below my camp became a rich rose-pink in the shining western light.
That evening I spent in deep comfort, robed in my blanket coat beside a hot stove (I had taken a new cold), but later, reading, in my blankets, Charles Marriot’s “ Modern Movements in Painting,” I was seized with a toothache. I did not sleep. Toward morning I extinguished my candle and listened to the delicate, surreptitious movements of a deer-mouse among my stores (all in tins). The rain began again with a soft treading on the stretched tent-roof, but soon it thickened.
For the next three days it rained, changing, with the night chill, to soft, heavy snowflakes for the sake of variety. Great grey clouds like great grey masses of fog drifted down the mountainside, immersing my encampment. Look from Vancouver across English Bay to the dark slopes of Black Mountain, and you’ll see, if the weather has not changed, these ashen clouds wrapping the mountainside. Behind this obscurity is my camp.
The Snow-line Comes Down
Pollough Pogue
“The Province” May 5, 1925
As, with hardly a pause, the characteristic rain descended, I found comfort in the supposition that my camp, on Black Mountain, was at any rate below the snowline. But this belief, which seemed to rest on secure foundations, proved after all to be a fond creation of fancy. I had been taking too hopeful a view of the mountain weather. The snowline came down to me one memorable night, and stayed two days. It was as if the calendar had backed up, whimsically, from April to January. I had noticed, the night before, that the leaves of the alders beside the creek were almost complete, a pure and vivid green, and next morning I awoke and found my camp engulfed in snow.
For three days before, and immensity of cloud, a vast body, as big as half the mountainside, of heavy vapor, had enveloped my encampment, blotting out, in a thick mystery of grey, the slopes above, the descending tops of forests below, and the customary magnificent view of sea and land spread beneath.
Most of the time heavy discharges of rain fell from the monstrous swollen reservoirs of this cloud; the closest trees were wrapped in gauze; a ghostly dark made, in full day, a candle necessary for reading in the tent.
At times there was a thinning of the rain and raising of the lower parts the cloud; the light grew stronger as if the shades had been drawn back from windows, and immediate trees, swallowed up or almost obscured before, emerged from the grayness and disclosed, in unclouded detail, their forms. But these periods of slackening of the rain and release from the pressure of the cloud, were brief. I reclined, reading, in the tent, entertaining with precarious optimism the hope of eventual sunshine, at least for a day. “
On the night of the third day, toward dawn, I was aware, without being completely released from a heavy sleep, of exceptional cold, and half awake, inserted myself farther among the thick blankets. When I awoke to full consciousness, the tent-roof sagged beneath a heavy weight of snow. I put on my boots in haste. Outside, there was a spectral light. Trees whitened with snow stood ankle deep in the drift. On the tent roof the snow was four or five inches deep, and with a snowshoe I shoveled it off the canvas. My campground, my little open flat with its park-like groups of trees, all draped in phantom white, was a striking vision of some ghostly borderland between a country of dreams and the real earth. For a background it had the great sweep of mountainside above, with orderly tiers of conifers rising one above the other, and each of the myriad trees had at a pillow of snow.
Overhead the sky was without cloud, and jeweled with stars. The sun rose clear but its warmth [down] until toward midday soften [them?] and start a silver dripping from [the] trees
Haunted Trails of Hollyburn
Pollough Pogue
“The Province” May 3, 1925
The trails on Hollyburn Ridge, West Vancouver’s alpine paradise, are the oldest trails in the Vancouver mountains, and are haunted by the ghosts of the past. Legends of pioneer logging are suggested by the cross skids nicked in the middle, still fixed in the Hollyburn trails. There are old miner’s trails, and at least one romantic story of a lost mine. Half a century ago, before Vancouver was contemplated, Moodyville loggers cut a giant harvest off Hollyburn, and the stubble they left shows how titanic were these cedars and firs. These timber harvesters engineered and built the old skid roads which are now the Hollyburn trails. They had a booming ground in the cove at West Vancouver.
Some say that these ancient logging roads, now, in their second incarnation, pleasure trails for hikers and nature students, have spectral visitations from dead bull-punchers who once a year in the misty light of dawn drive ox-teams down the old cross skid trails.
SOME TRAILS ARE SIWASH TRACKS
The Hollyburn Ridge trails, shown in the sketch map on this page, or almost all former skidroads slashed and beavered through the mountain forests forty or fifty or even sixty years ago by logging operators as highways for logs reaped from the timbered slopes. A few of the paths are old hunting tracks worn originally by Siwash moccasins. These, of course, are the oldest.
The present trails used by hikers cross creeks on bridges built in the beginning by the pioneer loggers, and repaired by later outfits of timber operators who have cut logs on the mountain as recently as a few years ago. The Naismith company operated on a rather large scale for a time but gave up logging on Hollyburn several years ago. This company improved and repaired the trails. The Shields concern still logging, built one of the best known paths, the box-flume trail that runs east and west along the sidehills above West Vancouver.
Lately some “ haywire” operators have cut shingle timber and yellow cedar (Western cypress) on the ridge, but to the immense satisfaction of hikers and nature lovers a great deal of green timber remains uncut on Hollyburn. Unless consumed by fire, it will stand for a long time, owing to the cost of getting it down the mountain.
“Sue” Moody’s loggers, in red and white checkered wincey shirts and fullcloth or cottonade trousers tucked into long boots with scarlet tops, reaped the first forest crop off Hollyburn Ridge, then called Black Mountain or Cypress Mountain, and to get the tree giants to their booming-ground at Hollyburn, they built the old skidroads and travoy trails.
Long after the big mills at Moodyville had sawn the great firs and cedars that these bearded lumberjacks harvested, the Naismith outfit, lured by the rich timber still standing on the ridge, joined together some of the old roads and roughed out many miles of new bush paths, scooping out sidehills, bridging creeks and throwing down corduroy where it was needed., and created a fair forest highway from the end of Twenty-sixth street, Dundarave, to the far side of the ridge. The Naismith operation built a sawmill at the 2,500 foot level, and a lumber flume, from the mill down to what is now Sherman station on the P. G. E. Railway, near the Great Northern cannery. The Naismith company extended their trail through the Six Lake district on the flat top of the ridge, and at an elevation of nearly 4,000 feet, excavated ditches and built rock dams to form a reservoir to store up water so that they might operate their flume in the dry season. All their improvements are now used by hikers. The mill longer saws lumber, but is a picturesque ruin. The cabins and shacks along the trails are shelter camps for hikers. The bunkhouses at the mill have been turned into a ski camp. The heavy sawmill machinery dragged to to the little flat on which the mill was built, has been dragged down again by the donkey-engines.
The most popular route up Hollyburn, followed in summer by hundreds of hikers each weekend, begins at the head of Twenty-second street, for which one of the old skidroads leads to the box flume trail. The flume is followed to the Naismith trail, which intersects it at the 1,600-foot elevation above Twenty-sixth street, then the Naismith trail is followed to the mill. From Twenty-second street to the intersection the trail is almost as easy as a path in Stanley Park. It was built in the beginning for oxen and horses. It is neither steep nor rough. In summer it is a green tunnel of leaves. In winter it is sheeted and wrapped in the creamy beauty of the snow.
After the intersection the Naismith trail grows steeper as it mounts over rocky ledges, but it is never really difficult. Mountain climbers call it quite easy. It is much easier than the Grouse Mountain trails. Many thousands of feet of logs have been dragged over it by animals, and donkeys engines have climbed it pulling great sleds loaded with tons of machinery.
PLUNGES INTO SPLENDID FOREST
At the old mill it crosses the sawdust covered millyard and plunges into a splendid green forest. In the fragrant dusk of this characteristic coast range wouod the hiker climbs easy grades for three-quarters of an hour. Then the forest ravels out into a thin fringe of cypress and pine and hemlock and the trees show the alpine character in picturesquely warped and gnarled trunks and limbs. Dwarfed sinewy, they look like goblin trees. The trail passes a tumbling log-cabin, hunched up on the shore of an emerald Lake, in the satiny surface of which the dark trees around its rim are exactly painted. It crosses a series of mountain meadows and parks, looping around the curved shores of five other darkly shining lakes, fringed with somber alpine trees. In summer this plateau is rich in wild flowers, and blueberries.
At a rock dam on the farther side of the flat the trail ends, but by cruising westerly, over open alpine parks, and climbing high rock ledges covered with scattering timber, hikers attain Hollyburn peak, called by some Mount Vaughan, from whose granite summit there is a noble view over the field of mountains between Hollyburn ridge and Howe Sound, and across the deep canyons to the east and south. The Lion peaks appear close at hand from here. This is a real rugged mountain height.
To make the trip from West Vancouver to Hollyburn peak, and back in a day is a splendid hike. Start early in the morning or you’ll be late getting back. Looking from the rock knob on the top of Hollyburn, the next ridge, Mt. Strahan, invites you. Camp at the Naismith mill, and start from there, and you can make Strahan and back next day easily.
THE OLD BLACK MOUNTAIN TRAIL
If you look at the trail-map of Hollyburn, you will see that there is marked on it the trail that begins on the west bank of the Capilano at the end of the suspension bridge that swings high over the emerald river.
This is said by old-timers to be the oldest of the Hollyburn Ridge trails, Over half a century ago, when mineral prospectors cruised over the ridge, and hiked into the mountains between the ridge and Howe Sound, they called the ridge Black Mountain.
This is a prospector’s and hunter’s trail, and if you saw any phantoms of the past on this trail they would be ghosts of quartz-seekers or deer-slayers. The trail is not well-defined now, for except by spectral feet, it is seldom trodden, and wild nature has woven her forest mat of salal and vines and purple heather hide the track, and fern and salmonberry flourish where shoepacks wore out a path when Hastings street and Granville street were forest trails.
But the old footway may still be followed; nature’s damp luxuriance has hidden but not obliterated it. It leads up the long eastern slope of the ridge to the tableland on the top. Pushing among high bracken and shrubbery and mounting over fallen logs and wading through devil’s club and blueberry bushes and crossing the blackened swaths of old bushfires, the hiker reaches three lovely mountain lakes rimmed by green timber, and marshy meadows where blue gentians grow. Hikers call these lakes East, Middle and West. It is about half an hour’s tramp up from West Lake to the group of lakes called Six Lakes by hikers, between which the Naismith trail winds on its way to the other side of the ridge and Hollyburn peak, the region’s highest elevation.
SPLENDID VIEW FROM BOX-FLUME TRAIL
Hikers who don’t want to make the trip to the top of the ridge, owing to lack of time or to disinclination to exertion, are advised to hit the box-flume trail shown on the map, built by the constructors of the Shields water-carrying flume which runs, a four-mile-long box on stilts beside the trail, from Bob Shield’s logging operation just about Ambleside, west to Cypress Creek.
The flume and the trail follow a narrow shelf on the side of Hollyburn Ridge at elevations of from 1200 to 1,500 feet, a sufficient height to afford a wonderful view of English Bay, the Straits of Georgia, Howe Sound, Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, Point Grey, Lulu Island and the Fraser Valley to the west. In clear weather Mount Rainier may be seen from this trail. To the eastward you get a glorious view of Mount Baker and the snow-covered peaks it dominates. From this viewpoint, more than any other, you realize what a magnificent mountain old Baker is. Vancouver harbour and the city lie spread beneath you, as if you were looking at a vast photograph taken from an airplane. These views are much more extensive than the outlook from the Grouse plateau, or from any other elevation in the Vancouver district.
The box flume trail is very lovely in the summer-time, as it passes through green woods, luxuriant because of the southern exposure, and sheltered from the northerly winds.
The trail is almost level, and is reached from the head of Twenty-second street by following the old cross-skid road, which climbs the side of Hollyburn to the box-flume. This old skid-road is the easiest trail on Hollyburn, except the box-flume trail itself. The box-flume is no longer in use, and when you get about an hour’s hike west of where the flume trail is intersected by the Naismith trail that climbs the mountainside from the head of Twenty-sixth street, Dundarave, the trail gradually disappears, but if you wish to make the trip to Cypress creek gulch, you can easily walk in the flume. It is not dangerous. It will take you to a wild and romantic canyon.
Pony Tracks on Hollyburn
Pollough Pogue
“The Province” May 15, 1925
When Fred Scott, the dude wrangler, wearing the romantic cowboy trap. plugs of his calling, and sitting loosely in a Texas saddle on a characteristic pony, appeared at the ski camp on Hollyburn wrangling one happy dude decorated with a pictorial if needless pair of goatskin chaparajos and seated in a stock saddle on a gentle dude horse, Eilif and Bill and I felt that Hollyburn mountain had reached a new degree of progression in its development as a popular alpine resort.
The word ‘dude’, as a colloquial expression meaning a youthful fop, was dropped from familiar slang many years ago. You never hear it now used in its old sense. But in a special limited sense it has persisted. It now means a helpless individual, tourist or health seeker, who visits the Western mountains or the stock ranges, riding the trails on a subdued pony, attended by a cowboy escort.
In the abrupt and racy vocabulary of the stock country, ‘wrangler’ means a competent man who has charge of a string of horses, or a bunch of dudes, or a single dude. The ranches which accept dudes as paying guests are called dude ranches. The careless cowpunchers who tenderly nurse these dudes and save them injury or death on the pony trails and in the hills are called dude wranglers. I have never heard that these efficient gentlemen of the saddle cared particularly for their job of watching over the dudes, but there is good money in it. A long time ago the experienced Western men used to call the dude a tenderfoot. That word is seldom used now. I think there is more scorn in the word dude.
It gives a mountain distinction in this tourist country to have a dude wrangling outfit of saddle ponies attached to it. This is what has happened recently to Hollyburn. Fat and lazy people, who would never reach the top of a mountain if they had to walk up may now sit in a Mexican saddle and be carried up the big hills behind West Vancouver by a domesticated broncho, who must feel some mortification, but, of course, has to earn his lIving, and like many of us, must submit to some abasement of pride in doing it. The dudes joyously buckle on the panoply of the Western rider, the elaborate spurs, the leather chaps, and, assisted into the saddle, look almost as if they had ridden horses before. Human beings such as these dudes love to masquerade, particularly in the gallant accouterments of the horseman.
It was on an experimental jaunt, to discover the best trails, or those suitable for horses, that Fred Scott, a long-limbed young man used to the saddle, wIth a weather-beaten, competent Western Canadian face, a big ranch hat and high-heeled boots arid a belt with a large brass buckle, rode up to the ski camp at the old Naismith mill. He swung from his careless seat in the saddle and his great spurs clanked as his high heels touched the ground. His one adventurous dude climbed less casually down. The dude immediately expressed pride in the achievement of having ridden a horse up Hollyburn. He admired enthusiastically the scenery from the ski camp. A wonderful spot, invigorating air, what! We haven’t got the habit of enthusiasm, hut we thought him a very agreeable dude. Fred Scott said nothing until he had fed his horses. Then he talked in a quiet drawl, slowly arranging a cigarette with a wheat-straw paper and the inescapable tobacco dust from a small cotton back. With big battered fingers he nimbly rolled up the quick tobacco. It was, he said, a fine mountain we had. A good trail. They had made her fine.
Hikers
Pollough Pogue
“The Province” June 2, 1925
Long before the rising sun shot its flashing arrows through the fir tops, a continuous string of hikers already, on the twenty-fourth of May, moved slowly up the steep main trail which passes not far from my camp at the 2,000 ft. level. For the next three hours there was seldom a very long hiatus in the continuing dispersed gasping file.
To me, an apparent casual logger in grimy trousers and mackinaw “stag” shirt, the hikers gave no attention. At any rate, many of them were absorbed in their assertions and the difficulties of the ascent. But, sitting on my easy log with, inevitably, a wheatstraw cigarette, the hikers were of considerable interest to me.
To many of the women and some of the men, the hiking garments they wore, the universal breeches, golf stockings and sweaters were a novelty, in which, as yet, they were conscious of their appearance, the feeling of a soldier when he wears his uniform in public. Few of the women realized that, in breeches and stockings, they looked more engaging than in their familiar spirits or frocks. They wore breaches because, for hiking, it is the mode.
Most of them were laboring for breath, because, although unaccustomed to physical effort, they were traveling too fast. They were climbing at the rate of 1,500 feet an hour, perhaps, or more, while the experienced hikers were ascending at the rate of from 800 to 1,000 feet an hour comfortably. Most of the inexperienced were carrying too much. I saw at least a dozen kinds of backpacks and back frames, the Deluth packsack, the favorite of loggers, the most practical of woodsmen, the Whelen pack, rucksacks of many kinds and several sorts of military knapsack. All were stuffed full and most of were riding too low for comfort. These tenderfoot hikers were prepared to spend the night in the bush, or to camp crudely in the trail cabins, sleeping cold because they had not enough blankets. I do not enjoy camping out unless I have a comfortable bed, but these hikers appear to think discomfort is an inescapable part of the game. It is not. As I observed them, I was sure that most of them were obsessed by a fixed idea of getting to the top of the mountain as soon as possible, for they did not appear to be feeling the vernal beauty of the woods, or appreciating the delicious and fragrant sylvan morning. Almost all of them were eating as they hiked, either raisins are candy, or oranges, or biscuits. The trails they follow are strewn with rappers and empty containers and orange peel. It seemed to me that many were not enjoying their hike, and would not find real pleasure in camping out for the night. In retrospect, going back over in thought afterward their experiences, they might enjoy them immensely, but the real thing they did not sincerely like.
Speculating on their motives, the sources of the impulses that made them laboriously climb the mountain, I decided they didn’t do it quite for the fun of the thing.
In the same spirit hundreds of people camp out in the woods, voluntarily suffering for some days or weeks the hardships and privations of the pioneers of settlement. Without the experience that would enable them to be comfortable in an offhand camp, they live in primitive discomfort, but with a regenerative sense of freedom from the artificial obligations of civilization, and of refreshment mystically derived, in spite of a comfortless life, from wild nature. Camping out is a healthy reaction from an involved civilization. The tonic administered by the wilderness, though often unpalatable, is wholesome.
These and experienced hikers will learn the craft of the trail, and they will not, after a few trips, walk too fast uphill, backback too much, sleep cold or allow the mosquitoes to bite them freely. They will graduate into wildcrafters and nature students, and then they will really enjoy hiking and camping.
Among the tenderfeet hikers were a few of the graduates of the school of woodcraft, easily recognized by their trail-worn raiment, easy stride, high-riding packs, leisure and assurance, and by the superior patronizing air with which they regarded the panting tenderfeet.
"The Cabin"
Pollough Pogue
"The Province" November 10, 1926
“Home” is the most expansive word in the language, indefinitely expansive, as chemists say about gases.
It may mean a palace or a castle, a cabin or a tent, a cave or a lean-to of poles. In its most sketchy sense, home means a shelter or a partial shelter (the roof may leak).
But though the word “home” may signify so little and still convey its full meaning, there are in this world many men who are homeless. A moralist (such as you are reader) would say that it is their own fault.
At present I am homeless and it isn’t my own fault.
Over a year ago my tent at the 1500-foot level was stolen while I was absent on the top of the mountain.
There was a small cabin, untenanted except by packrats, at the old sawmill at the 2500-foot level. It was in a dilapidated condition and dirty, but I cleaned and repaired it, and moved in. Two good friends gave me able help with the repairs. (See Footnote 1). The interior was made comfortable, and the roof of cedar shakes fixed so that it did not leak in the heaviest rains. I made the kind of house furniture, tables and chairs, that the pioneers shaped for their small cabins. An old stove was installed. The inside walls had been covered by a lining of boards. A partition divided the cabin into two rooms. In each of these was built a bunk.
A bunk is a form of bed universal in small and rudely constructed dwellings in the forest, in the mountains or on the edge of civilization. It is a box shaped of lumber, or peeled poles, and filled with fir boughs bowed down and laid from head to foot with the ends of one row overlapping the ends of the next, like shingles. This makes the bed as elastic as a spring mattress.
My bunks, built into the sides of the rooms between the partition and the walls, were constructed more elaborately than usual; they were boxed in and roofed over, and only partly open in front; they were deeper and wider, with shelves for books, pipes, tobacco and candles, and my four-point blankets spread on a bough mattress shingled with exceptional painstaking care, in my own bunk made up a luxurious bed. The other bunk was intended for the casual guests of a mountain trail.
It is an animal instinct to “den-up,” to creep into the warmth and comfort and safety of a withdrawn lair; this instinct is very strong in me, inherited, I suppose, from ancestors who reveled in the snug security and shelter of a cave. I loved the thick blankets and soft security of my boxed-in bunk; I took infinite delight and satisfaction in its cosiness and gloom. Lying there, reading by candlelight in the long winter evenings, and at length sinking into sleep lulled by the wash and rattle of the rain on the roof shakes, and the beating roar of the creek, seemed to me the peak of human pleasure.
In the candlelit retirement of my bunk, I found old books, read many times before, more engaging. I found that the meditative lines of Reverend John Donne comforted my spirit, before I fell off to sleep, more than ever before. The whole adventure, with every aspect of which I was familiar, of Robinson Crusoe in his delightful island (which I would never have wanted to leave) seemed to me more vital and moving than at any time since my boyhood. I realized now, in the tobacco-scented bunk, its full charm. The human philosophy and interest of Thoreau’s Walden expanded in the soft light of my candles, and I felt more strongly, among the scarlet and green and yellow striped blankets of the Hudson’s Bay Company, with their associations of rich peltries and snowshoe trails, the fascination of Parkman.
The small cabin, with the addition of a covered porch, which was practically another room, and glass in its windows, and heated by its patched up stove, was a place to fill one with a sense of homely comfort. It was a convenient base from which to explore the big mountain, and continue my eager, intimate observations of wild life.
So I spent, outdoors, a great deal of time. I wrote when the rain held me indoors, but as usual with me, little of my writing survived the exact scrutiny of colder moods that quickly followed the kindled and spiritlike tempers of mind in which the creative impulse was active.
Otherwise I lived the life of a pioneer, a lonely prospector of minerals in the deep hills, or a hermit secluded in his pleasant hermitage.
I liked the life; I liked the cabin, with its walls decorated with evergreen bough, sprays of frosted vines, and old snowshoes, skis and guns.
I liked the mountain; I had a deepening feeling for the woods and wild nature.
Why not stay here, I often asked myself. I was now an aged man, with but a few more years to look forward to. (See Footnote 2). If I could choose my burial place, at the not remote end, it would be here under a Douglas fir. The summer came and passed.
Then I was told, suddenly, that I would be forced to leave the cabin.
The owner of the mill cabins had decreed their demolition. I would have to leave at once, his representative told me. (See Footnote 3).
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Footnote 1. “Two good friends” were Eilif Haxthow and Bill Beck, who were operating the ski camp at the abandoned Nasmyth Mill site. Excerpt from Eilif Haxthow’s journal, Hollyburn Ridge, November 30,1925: Another newcomer has also joined our group. It is Pogue. When the rainy season started in earnest, he and his tent just about washed away. When he didn’t want to move back to town, Bill and I fixed up a little cabin just above our place and that is where he is set for the winter.
Footnote 2. Pollough Pogue was 51 when he wrote this article. He passed away on March 26, 1961 at the age of 85.
Footnote 3. Pollough Pogue continued to live in his Hollyburn cabin at the abandoned Nasmyth mill site for at least one more year.
Real Winter
Pollough Pogue
December 28, 1926
It is a rule of life that sometimes when we get what we want we find that it is not as desirable in reality as it was in imagination.
In my cabin on Hollyburn Mountain, I have been praying for real winter, but now that I have got my wish I will acknowledge a sneaking desire for milder weather. The thin board walls of my cabin are a weak defense against sharp frosts and icy winds, and the manufacturer of my small “woodhog” stove certainly never had heard of the sufferings of frostbitten exploring parties in the blizzard-swept Arctic.
Since I came to dwell in this sketch of a cabin over a year ago the weather has hardly been cold enough to make a man accustomed to an outdoor life feel the need of a stove.
But it is so cold now that the stove, functioning at its highest caloric capacity, cannot prevent water in a pail at the other side of the room from freezing.
It is so cold that, at night, when I am in my bunk underneath my four-point Hudson’s Bay blankets that are almost as thick as peltries of furs, and the fire is out in the deficient stove, the cabin’s framework groans and some of the trees outside snap as they contract in the frost. My window is a fairy casement through which I see a magic forest, tall and black evergreens whitened with snow crowding round the cabin in the strange beauty of the spectral moonlight.
It is so cold that when the rugged Dalcarlians (editor’s note - Swedes, in this case Klockar Oscar Persson/Oscar Pearson, Djäken Olof Andersson/Ole Anderson and Israels Anders Andersson/Andrew Irving) who are building the new Hollyburn ski-camp at First Lake, start from their cabin at the old mill in the ash-grey light of the late December dawn, to go to work, the dry snow of the trail, over which a team has towed many jags of lumber, grinds under their skis with a sharp and musical whining. Until this winter, I have not heard that sound since my Ontario winters of many years ago.
The snow-caps on the big stumps around the mill are nearly two feet thick, and at First Lake the snow is quite two feet deep.
The new trail cut by the Dalcarlians from First Lake to the old mill, for the purpose of moving lumber to the new camp to the mill, has been smoothed by the dragged lumber into a perfect ski slide. Starting at First Lake, the skiers can slide for about a mile in safety, for the trail is not steep.
It is deerskin moccasin weather; you can wear moccasins and they will keep you dry: the snowshoeing is good for Canadian snowshoes as well as skis; the snow is firm and dry.
The great Hollyburn plateau has a wilder and more romantically desolate aspect than you’ll find on any other mountain in the Vancouver district: now this mother-forgotten mountain top has a dreadful and sinister beauty, and the savage suggestion of some frozen and lifeless planet.
Go up there and you will feel its chilly fascination, but do not get lost in this snow waste.