July 2 Minimum overnight Turn Camp, foot of Ogilvie

PHYSICAL TESTING LABORATORY

SUMMARY OF TEST OF ANEROID BAROMETER NO. PTL 8408

Glacier

28

Name: Mountain Special.

Maker: Short & Mason

Range: 31 to 14 in. Diam.: 4 in. Smallest Scale Division: 0.05 in. Submitted by: Geodetic Survey of Canada.

Name: Stanley, London.

PHYSICAL TESTING LABORATORY

SUMMARY OF TEST OF ANEROID BAROMETER No. 1455

Range: 31 to 21 in. Diam.: 411⁄2 in. Smallest Scale Division: 0.05 in.

Maker: Stanley, London.

Submitted by: Geodetic Survey of Canada.
Test No.: 8416.

WILD LIFE OF THE UPPER CHITINA

By HAMILTON M. LAING.

On May 18th, 1925, leaving the party of climbers at Trail End, I returned about eight miles lower to the Hubrick Camp. This was the only available base camp from which biological work could be successfully carried on through the summer, Turn, of course, being too high, and there was no other food cache lower down the valley.

The region adjoining this camp had appeared in passing to be an interesting and picturesque section, and now I was to have opportunity to explore its possibilities more fully. To the eye it was beautiful but a trifle crude and raw and forbidding. Before the tent lay a wide valley of grey gravel, very flat and as barren as any desert. The valley floor was cut and furrowed by many white streams of glacial water that hurried rather aimlessly in uncertain channels. The mountain sides rose steeply right from the gravel-green timber at the lowest levels, and a mixture of open uplands, rocky cliffs and snowy ridges rising up to the skyline. The eastern or upper end of the valley was choked with the grey moraine of the Chitina Glacier; there was a little timber on its extreme front and behind this lay a chaos of jumbled rocks with gray-green pot-holes and lakelets scattered plentifully. Far up the valley, over the forbidding barrier of the moraine loomed the white Chitina and Boundary Mountain, and beyond. the great, massive top of the mighty Logan.

From the standpoint of the naturalist the woods and hills were attractive and held out promise of many interesting things. If the valley floor was almost utterly barren of life and plainly must remain so throughout the summer on account of the floods at time of high water, the green spruce woods and the alpine slopes above timberline offered better prospects. Already white-winged

crossbills and redpolls were chattering commonly in the timber. Whisky Jack was on hand at the camp; the voice of the raven echoed across the valley, and his cousin the magpies showed his black and white coat as he flitted about the dark spruces. The red-tailed hawk was at his airy circling over the hillsides, and almost at any hour the big golden eagle, black and ominous, could be seen wheeling far aloft about the cliffs. Nor were all the wild neighbors members of the winged tribes, for we had seen bear tracks, both black and grizzly, commonly in the sand and mud of the gravel bars, and we were now in the home of the white mountain sheep. On the day we reached the Hubrick Camp a big black bruin, still sleek in his winter coat, was busily working in a bearberry patch on a sunny slope close above the tent; fifty or sixty sheep in small groups were dotting the hillsides from timberline down to the lower pastures near the river.

In working a new region it is essential that the field naturalist secure a representative collection; that is, representative of every form of life as far as possible, and comparative series of specimens as far as time will allow. As I had come supplied with a collecting outfit for preparing skins of birds and mammals, a plant press, a still camera and a movie camera, there seemed little prospect that time would hang heavy on my hands, even in a region that was known to be rather lacking in faunal variety. The days were now nearly twenty-four hours long; there was no real darkness as the sun took but a shallow dip below the mountains. But long, busy days were perhaps the best antidote for loneliness and not even a palliative was needed, though from mid-May till mid-August no human face was seen except in the two weeks in July, during which the successful climbers passed through on their return.