Both banks of the river are of sandstone, capped on the left by a wall of cream-coloured rock, seventy or eighty feet in height, at a guess.

A creek comes in from the west which has cloven the sandstone bank almost to the water's edge; and running along the top of these sandstone formations are, everywhere, thick layers of coal, which is also found, in a great bed, on the opposite shore, and about three miles back from the river.

The coal had been used by a trapper there, and is a good burner and heater, leaving little ash or clinker.
These coal beds seem to extend in all directions, on both sides of the river, and underlie a very large extent of country.

The inland country for some eight or ten miles had been examined by Sergeant Anderson, of the Mounted Police post here, who described it as consisting of wide ridges, or tables, of first-rate soil, divided by shallow muskegs; a good farming locality, with abundance of large, merchantable spruce timber.

Moose were plentiful in the region, and it was a capital one for marten, one white trapper, the winter before our visit, having secured over a hundred skins.
On the 25th we left our comfortable spruce beds and "long fires," and tracked on to House River, which we reached at nine a.m.