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National Geographic : 1925 Apr
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THE MOTHER OF RIVERS Photograph by Biyron iarmon FLOUNDERING HORSES AND SWIMMING DOGS IN THE ALEXANDRA RIVER Several animals were carried downstream 1oo feet or more, but luckily found sloping bars upon which to clamber to safety (see text, page 427). Finding it no longer possible to con tinue up the half-flooded flats of the Bow, the following morning the horses were dragged and shoved for 500 feet up the steep eastern wall of the valley to where a narrow trail had been blazed many years before. It was a desperately hard scramble for loaded animals, and far from soft work for men. MOVING BOULDERS AND AVOIDING AVALANCHES Every few feet hair-poised boulders, left by the slide whose wake we followed, had to be rolled aside to give footing to the scrambling horses. To turn a rock over and prop it up to prevent its rolling down a 50-degree slope on to a pack train strung out below are operations that re quire both care and judgment, to say nothing of strength. By keeping very much in open order and out of a direct line below the point where active road work was in progress, we managed to avoid pieces of rock which went adrift and headed little avalanches to the valley. We had too much of the same sort of mountain-side work in loose rock with the pack train before the trip was over, and, speaking personally, I was never able to stir up any enthusiasm for it. With each of the four floundering feet of 16 horses (not to mention those of five men and two dogs) a potential starter of a moving mountain side, the feeling en gendered is far from the one of com fortable placidity that comes with the reassuring clasp of a rope on the rim of a Ioo-foot crevasse. The trail which we labored so hard to gain proved to be the almost obliterated remains of what had been only a wretched track at best. It was blocked here and there by fallen timber, which had to be cut away whenever presenting too high a barrier for the horses. Congratulating ourselves on the fact that the well-drained mountain side would at least give better footing than the bot tomless muskeg, we started worrying the train along through the prostrate tree trunks as best we could. We had made about a mile when an innocuous-looking 389
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