On the 13th we pursued our journey, and entered into the valleys between the mountains, where there lay not less than four or five feet of snow.  We were obliged to ford the river ten or a dozen times in the course of the day, sometimes with the water up to our necks.  These frequent fordings were rendered necessary by abrupt and steep rocks or bluffs, which it was impossible to get over without plunging into the wood for a great distance.  The stream being very swift, and rushing over a bed of stones, one of the men fell and lost a sack containing our last piece of salt pork, which we were preserving as a most precious treasure.  The circumstances in which we found ourselves made us regard this as a most unfortunate accident.  We encamped that night at the foot of a steep mountain, and sent on Mr. Pillet and the guide, M’Kay, to hasten a supply of provisions to meet us.

On the morning of the 14th we began to climb the mountain which we had before us.  We were obliged to stop every moment, to take breath, so stiff was the ascent.  Happily it had frozen hard the night before, and the crust of the snow was sufficient to bear us.  After two or three hours of incredible exertions and fatigues, we arrived at the plateau or summit, and followed the footprints of those who had preceded us.  This mountain is placed between two others a great deal more elevated, compared with which it is but a hill, and of which, indeed, it is only, as it were, the valley.  Our march soon became fatiguing, on account of the depth of the snow, which, softened by the rays of the sun, could no longer bear us as in the morning.  We were obliged to follow exactly the traces of those who had preceded us, and to plunge our legs up to the knees in the holes they had made, so that it was as if we had put on and taken off, at every step, a very large pair of boots.  At last we arrived at a good hard bottom, and a clear space, which our guide said was a little lake frozen over, and here we stopped for the night.  This lake, or rather these lakes (for there are two) are situated in the midst of the valley or cup of the mountains.  On either side were immense glaciers, or ice-bound rocks, on which the rays of the setting sun reflected the most beautiful prismatic colors.  One of these icy peaks was like a fortress of rock; it rose perpendicularly some fifteen or eighteen hundred feet above the level of the lakes, and had the summit covered with ice.  Mr. J. Henry, who first discovered the pass, gave this extraordinary rock the name of M’Gillivray’s Rock, in honor of one of the partners of the N.W.  Company.  The lakes themselves are not much over three or four hundred yards in circuit, and not over two hundred yards apart.  Canoe river, which, as we have already seen, flows to the west, and falls into the Columbia, takes its rise in one of them; while the other gives birth to one of the branches of the Athabasca, which runs first eastward, then northward, and which,