Eerie Silences

I want to quote this piece from Pierre Berton's The National Dream, here describing a surveyor, Robert Rylatt, who was given the task of surveying the Howse Pass in 1871.  The pass is some 200 km northwest of Calgary, Alberta ... and at the time, less than half a dozen Europeans had seen it.  For a brief period, it was proposed as a possible route for the Canadian transcontinental railway, but later discarded.

The quote describes Rylatt's initial impression of the land, from Berton's paraphrase of Rylatt's diary:

"On his first Sunday in the mountains, he found himself alone ~ the others were working five miles farther up the pass.  It was his first such experience in the wilderness and he made the most of it.  He watched the sun dropping down behind the glaciers on the mountain tops, tipping the snows with a gold that turned to red while, in the shadowed gorges, the ice could be seen in long streaks of transparent blue.  He watched the glow leave the peaks and the gloom fill up the valleys.  he watched velvet night follow ghostly twilight and saw the pale rays of the aurora compete with the stars to cast [Rylatt's words] 'softening hallows of light around these everlasting snows.'  Suddenly, he began to shiver and a sense of irreconcialable loneliness overcame him.  It was silence ~ the uncanny and overpowering silence of the Canadian wilderness: 'Not a leaf stirred; not the hum of an insect; not even the noise of the water in the creek ~ this being too distant.  I listened for a sound but did not hear even the rustle of a falling leaf ...

"He made a fire, as much to hear the crackling of the wood as for the warmth.  It came to him that no one who had not experienced what he was going through could ever really understand what it was like to be truly alone:

" 'Your sense of being alone in the heart of a city, or even in a village, or within easy distance of fellow beings ... gives you no claim to use the term alone.  You may have the feeline peculiar to being alone ~ that is all.  Listen sometime when you think you are alone.  Can you hear a footfall; a door slam in the distance; a carriage go by?  Or the rumble of one ...?  Can you hear a dog bark?  Have you a cricket on the hearth or even the ticking of a clock ...?

"Rylatt realized that the tiniest of sounds can give a feeling of relief ~ 'the sense of knowing your species are at no great distance' ~ but here, in the solitude of the Rockies, there was only silence."

I've experience that, in those same mountains.  For those who might know, Howse Pass is bounded on the east side by Howse Peak, 10km south of Saskatchewan River Crossing.  There's a lake on the east side of Howse Peak, Chephren Lake, where I've fished and spent the night, some 44 years ago.  There, and dozens of other places in the Rockies, I've heard that self-same eerie silence.

Chephren Lake, with Howse Peak in the background