Up and Down Bald Mountain from Shawnigan Lake’s Cliffside

January 12, 1929

A Bit of Malahat Ridge on a Frosty Morning; Across the Drift; Cliff-dwelling Plants; the Mossy North

By Robert Connell – noted Island Naturalist

A silver morning again!  Roofs white with frost, dead leaves edged and patterned with ice-crystals, blades of ice running out into wayside pools.  Already the sun is at work, but there are soft clouds, warm-tinted, purple shadowed, coming up over the blue of the sky to intercept the rays.

As the train pulls into Cliffside, white mist lies along the valley of Shawnigan Lake; not a thick unbroken blanket, but a handful of fairy gossamer or an erratic nebula.  At the little mill the sawdust mound is reddened by melting frost.  The air is full of the tinkling of streamlets.  The ground is sightly frozen and gives, to the foot treading the particles of ice underneath, a faint crackling as of distant toast.

A path leads up from the railway and issues in a small skid way.  This track work by the logs, is being converted into a mountain stream.  Already the water has cut through the broad base of soil and formed a gutter of its own, down which it comes with noisy twittering, for it has uncovered a sufficiency of pebbles to make a rude tremulant of innumerable, tiny cascades.

Looking east towards Mt. Baldy

It suggests one of the ways in which the drainage of a logged-off area may be affected and, indeed, how the original channels of drainage must have been begun:  the streams fed by the rain remorselessly cutting, cutting down into the soil or the softer rocks in the days when there was no dense covering of vegetation to absorb the greater part of the rainfall.  So on the logged-off land history but repeats itself, the hand of man, the universal exploiter, taking now the place of the Great Ice.

A BIT OF MALAHAT RIDGE

But where am I going this frosty morning?  The traveler’s attention is generally directed to the lake below.  I know that has been so with me in the past.  Some clearing off on the east side of the railway must, I feel sure, have taken place, for Bald Mountain never made an impression on my mind until last Saturday, and with its proportions and situation it seems impossible that it could have been missed if the view of it from Cliffside had been as unrestricted as it is now. 

Bald Mountain forms the northeasterly extension of the Malahat Ridge, the bold and rugged rock lying between Shawnigan Lake and Saanich Inlet.  At the southeast it rises to nearly 2000 feet in Mount Jeffery, whose lofty precipices are a notable feature of the west shore of Saanich Arm above Bamberton.  Northwest of Jeffery is Mount Wood, whose crown attains the 2000 mark.  Then there intervenes a wide elevated valley or depression, from which, at a height of 1000 feet, opposite valleys slope away to the northeast and the southwest, the former carrying a tributary of the Millstream, the latter a mountain brook with a fall of nearly a thousand feet in a mile.

Beyond and veering east from the northeasterly trend of the other two lies Bald Mountain.  As seen today it rises, like Mount Douglas as seen from Victoria, about the comparatively gentle slopes of glacial tilt about at its base.  While not strictly a monadnock, it has all the appearance of one in the landscape, so distant does it seem from the rest of the Malahat Ridge.  To be a monadnock it would have to rise above the old Tertiary plain; actually, its summit is a remnant of that plain, and its present isolation is solely due to the to the cutting away of the old plain in the formation of the valley occupied by Shawnigan Lake and by the elevated valley between it and the rest of the Malahat Ridge. 

We have to visualize the Shawnigan Lake, Goldstream, Sooke Lake and Highland districts as they were about midway in the Tertiary period, when, instead of the present bold, mountainous region, with its valleys and lakes, the land surface had been reduced almost to a level, so that along the outer edge of the Island the general appearance must have something like that of the country south of the Sooke, Goldstream and Highland hills today, except that Mount Douglas, Mount Work and Mount Newton, rising above the lowlands of Victoria and Saanich now, had no counterparts in the old Tertiary lowlands of this particular region, with the exception of Empress, Healey and Survey Mountains, to the west beyond Sooke Lake.

ACROSS THE DRIFT

It was then, to Bald Mountain that I addressed myself.  Following the skid way for a short distance, I turned off towards my goal and began my course across the slope of drift extending to the base.  It is an easy task, nothing more than a moderately steep uphill walk.   There is little encumbrance of any kind.  The ground has been so thoroughly burnt over that vegetation of shrubby character is barely making itself evident. 

A few scattered old firs and a multitude of vigorous young arbutus tress, with second-growth fir, offer no difficulties, as even the latter are far from covering the ground.  A little light and dwarfed salal is present, with Oregon grape.  The soil, stones and decaying wood are all largely overgrown with a variety of lichens, so much so that a student of that department of botany would find himself abundantly supplied with material in a few square yards of the terrain.  The drift is cut by dry valleys, as well as water-conveying ones.  The dry ones must have been made in the drift before it became clothed with the plant life afterwards destroyed by fire.  Changes in the drainage system have taken place wince the days when they are formed, largely in the nature of deeper cutting by the surviving streams.

The drift steepens as it approaches the rocks and blackened remains of lupine become common.  In the Summer the drift slopes are gay with these handsome, blue-flowered plants, whose favorite home is just such open, dry hillsides.  Ocean-spray spirea is now frequent, with the prickly stems of the dwarf rose and the annoying trailers of the blackberry as companions.  It is stony ground, this drift full of worn fragments of the tough diorite rocks of the district, and thus furnishing a well-drained soil such as is beloved by the arbutus and the lupine and many humbler plants of the heath and composite families.  Near the mountain it is overlain by another material, a scree or tatus, of large angular blocks from the rocks above, and it is here that the Spirea and dwarf rose flourish exceedingly.

CLIFF-DWELLING PLANTS

There are cliff-dwellers among plants as among men, but while the human ones have probably be taken themselves to the rock only for a protection from their enemies, and their homes have never been more than a pausing phase or a temporary expedient, it has been otherwise with the plants.  Where they have betaken themselves so thoroughly to their surroundings that they have received the special imprint of the rocks, and the world over, they present certain easily recognizable characteristics and, in some cases, are as widespread as the environment they love. 

The crowberry, for example, is found from Alaska to Patagonia, rising higher and higher in the mountains and the Equator is approached, receding downwards as it tends towards the Poles.  A tiny little flower related closely to the potentillas of our meadows, and sometimes classed with them, grown on the Alps and the Himalayas, as well as on our own mountains on the Island and along the Coast.  It forms no small part of the low herbage on the Scottish mountains and is found further north in Scandinavia and into the Arctic regions.

The first notable plant on the cliffs of Bald Mountain, which now rise steeply above the drift and scree, is the cliff brake.  Its dark brown stems and thick fronds of olivaceous green spring from crevices in the rock, from the sheltered base of fallen fragments and from the well-drained soil covering the angular debris on the slopes and gullies.  It is one of the ferns marked by having two distinct kinds of fronds, one barren, the other bearing oval groups of spore capsules.  The two, thus distinct in their functions, are also distinct in appearance, the fertile fronds having their segments of “leaflets” narrower than those of the infertile ones. 

The stumps are six to eight inches high and form one of the most interesting features of our higher hills, where they may be almost said to take the place of heaths and heathers in the coloration of their foliage.  The folded or imbricated variety of the common “Swor-fern” occurs as usually, but it is not, so far as my observation goes, as plentiful, by any means, as the cliff brake on the side I ascended.  The silver-bark fern shows its dark, polished stems and triangular fronds, with their waxy undersides, but it, too, is not so plentiful as on many lower hills.  The reddish saxifrage is plentiful and shows already the flower buds in the centre of its rosette of shining leaves.  The altitude here is about 1200 feet, and the rock faces are broken by steep interspaces where the vegetation grows on the surface of debris from the heights above.

At 1400 feet, or about 150 feet below the summit, I saw the parsley fern in wet crevices.  It is rather like the cliff brake, but the two kinds of fronds are much more distinct in appearance and the color is greener.  The parsley fern grows in moister places than the cliff brake, but both ferns are so partial to rock situations that the name “rock brake” has been applied to each.  From the abundance of cliff brake found growing in the open on trees and away from the cliffs, the conclusion is arrived at that, as in many other names, “cliff brake” must not be taken too seriously.  Pellaea dense, the botanical name, is on the whole, better.  At this point of the scramble I came across the Kinnikinnik first, but I think it must have been common below at one time till the fires swept it off the drift slope.

FROM THE AIR

There was no climbing. In the strict sense of the word, to be done, since, precipitous as the rock front of Bald Mountain looks, it is traversed by a large number of crevices with comparatively easy slopes.  Some of them are narrow, little more than cracks, but others are wide belts extending diagonally across the face of the mountain for hundreds of feet.  These last mark the presence of shear zones in the rock, where in the course of earth movements, the diorite gneiss rock has yielded and been crushed and broken until, for a width of several feet, the originally tough and homogeneous material has become so shattered and weak that it is easily the prey of Nature’s attacks upon the mountain-side, much more so than the unaffected rock on either hand. 

The shear zones, then, weather more rapidly than the surrounding rock, and so shallow, tough-like depressions are formed, in which broken rock from above is added to the results of the decomposition of the zone of weakness and soil accumulates.  It thus comes to pass that the shear zones are easily identified by the pale yellow of the bunchy grasses growing in them.  Looking at what remained of the vegetation, it seemed that there was a good deal of similarity between the plant life of the grassy tracts as well as of the cliffs on the mountain-side and that on the westerly slopes of the hills on the east side of Sooke River.

By aneroid barometer the summit is 1373 feet above sea level.  The mountain is very hummocky above.  Douglas Fir, lodgepole pine, arbutus and manzanita are scattered about over the irregular surface.  The effect of westerly winds is shown in the strong easterly direction of branch growth on the trees in exposed positions.  I lunched on a lichen-covered ridge of rock from which one looked directly down upon the drift slopes. 

The lake lay extended below and dotting its sides were white farmhouses and their offices.  Far away to the southeast the sunlight caught the hill above Sooke Lake, turning them to pale gold, while to the northeast a similar glory fell on the far slopes of the Koksilah Valley.  In the still air, unruffled by any trace of a breeze, the smoke of half a dozen sawmills rose and mingled with the mist.  In the east the view was seriously impeded by trees and by the thickness of the atmosphere.  After lunch I decided to descend on the north side, but before doing so I followed the edge of the summit and dropped about a hundred feet below it.  Here I was fortunate in obtaining a particularly fine view of the lake.  Before me were the steep upper portions of the drift, here rising higher about the mountain’s flanks than in front, with a few scattered firs and bright green arbutuses, and on the left the sheer walls of stained rock. 

Away below lay extended the waters of the lake, looking for all the world like a fringed ribbon of silver on a piece of ble-black velvet.  The meeting-place of water and land was undefined, for the dark woods met their reflection and each lost itself in the other.  Over the wide expanse of blue and grey forest covering the hills to their topmost ridges faint inequalities of mist lay, while at a height of but a few hundred feet dark and ragged vapor seemed to be the cause of the broad bands of light and shade thrown by the sun upon the valley below Malahat Ridge.

THE MOSSY NORTH

Entering upon the northern slope, I found myself in conditions of life as different as those on the southwest slope of Mount Finlayson are from those on the north.  The coolness, the protection from the sun, were shown in the frost which still kept its hand upon the mosses and lichens.  Here the latter were composed o forest types rather than the stone-loving ones of the other side, while the mosses were predominantly “companions of the woods”, as represented by the fern-like hylocomium. 

Ridge of rock, thin woods, thickets of alder, alternated.  Then came a hollow where the ground was strewn with great maple leaves, russet with moisture.  Next a delightful spring pouring its waters into a small excavation in the soil, whence a narrow channel carried them downwards to a cistern, to be again taken by gleaming steel pipe to the Girls’ School which has replaced the old Shawnigan Lake Hotel.  I regained the railway a hundred yards or so south of the school and, returning to Cliffside, was able to see the sheared volcanic and intrusive diorites exposed in the cuttings. Here, as at intervals on the way down the north side, I saw the coarse, semi-erect kinnikinnick in considerable quantity along the sides of the railway.