Mr. Swannell said: “Excluding Finlay Valley above Prairie
Mountain as being at too high an altitude for such areas of good land
as exist to be of value economically, there remains between Grahame
and this point 300 square miles of good land. Ninety square miles of
this is river-bottom, excellent soil, but generally too heavily timbered
with spruce and cottonwood to be classified as farming land. Besides,
this bottom land is continually being eroded, the river often shifting half
a mile inaseason. These bottom lands are also much cut up by sloughs.
This leaves 210 square miles of bench lands, mostly in the first 50 miles
above Grahame. ‘There are 75 square miles of good land in the first 4o
miles up the Ingenika, excluding 10 miles of fine spruce timber. Climate
is rather less severe in winter than in Nechako Valley and snowfall in
the Lower Finlay light. Rainfall is abundant. There is almost entire
absence of summer frosts in the main Finlay Valley.”

The Finlay is exceedingly crooked, cut into many channels, with
numerous drift-piled bars, and erosion during high water is rapid.
Although actual distance from Grahame to the Ingenika is 14 miles, by
river it is fully 20 miles. Three-quarters of a mile below the Ingenika
the first rock-exposure is noted, a jutting reef on the right bank which
at high water forms a whirlpool. The alluvial bottom land, mostly
timbered with spruce and cottonwood, varies from 1% to 2 miles wide,
and the valley averages 6 miles in width, rising on the east in a succession
of benches, the highest 250 feet above river-level. The land is uniformly
good, loam or ie loam, and very seldom sandy. Timber is mostly jack-
pine and poplar. A pack-trail runs along the east side, keeping to the
benches to avoid the heavily timbered and slough-cut bottom lands.
Excepting a creek 50 feet wide, 2 feet deep, 8 miles from Grahame, and
three smaller creeks, the bench lands are without water other than an
occasional swamp. Nine miles above Grahame are several large swampy
meadows surrounded by excellent bottom land, but without draining
they appear of little value. For 10 miles above Ingenika River the Finlay
retains the same characteristics as below—tortuous, badly cut by bars
and sloughs. Five miles below Deserters Canyon, however, it gathers
into one channel 250 yards wide and northward reaches the mountain-
slope on the east. On the west the mountains are 8 miles back, but good
land extends only 2 miles from the river and then changes to undulating
burnt country full of small lakes and pot-holes and much broken by g gravel
ridges.

Deserters Canyon, the only bar to navigation in 175 miles, is a gorge
1%4 miles long, with cliff walls of varying height to 130 feet. It is 160
feet wide at the head, but broken in midstream by huge rock fragments.
At low water it can be run safely by canoe, but two riffles being at all
bad. At high water, however, navigation is impossible for anything but
large boats on account of heavy swells, swirls, eddies, and whirlpool. A
good portage-trail exists on the west side, where the Klondikers built
windlass and skids in 1898. Above Deserters Canyon the river maintains
width of 250 feet, making several large bends westward, with high cut-

Thirty-three.