The mountains are calling

I broke up with Germany a little over a month ago.  This sounds terribly dramatic, but that was how it felt at the time.  I was unwillingly wrenched away from my former love and immediately snatched up by a new burly, flannel-clad suitor – Canada – without so much as a solicitation of my opinion on the matter.  Everyone to whom I conveyed this feeling said it would be fine, to just give it time, that Canada was great and I would fall in love with it too.  But I’ve never been very good at rebounding.  I just don’t bounce; I need time to grieve.  And so I resented this new country at first, despite its friendliness and gentle nature.  Not even the crisp promise of the impending fall – my favorite season – could sway my displeasure.

I’m unfortunately not a terribly patient person either; I longed to immediately forget the pain of leaving Freiburg and just get on with settling into Edmonton.  But much like trying to force oneself to sleep, pushing towards forgetting is simply impossible.  So instead I opted for distraction.

Luckily the decision of how to immediately distract myself required no thought, since I had wheels and ample free time:  the Rocky Mountains were calling.

My first introduction to the Canadian Rockies was a brief solo trip, a mere thirty hours spent scraping the surface of what Jasper National Park had to offer.  I almost backed out of it multiple times, but knowing myself and anticipating this reluctance, I’d built an almost-inescapable failsafe into the trip by booking an unchangeable campsite reservation.  The rugged beauty and abundant alpine wildlife (elk, mountain goats, and pika) may not have immediately lessened my resentment towards Canada, but it soothed my frayed nerves and calmed the raging flooded river of thoughts in my head.

When I returned to Edmonton further distractions began pouring in from the couchsurfing website, with strangers from all over the world offering to meet up with me and explore Edmonton together.  One night, I found myself in a hole-in-the-wall bar filled with music students swaying to a rapid succession of increasingly boisterous local bands, the last of which appeared on stage in full angels-and-demons regalia.  The next day, on a whim, I responded to a post made by a round-the-world German traveler who wanted travel companions to explore the mountains with.  After a brief meeting in a bouldering gym to get to know each other, we loaded up my trusty Subaru with the added company of a visiting doctor from Portugal and headed west.

We retraced my steps towards Jasper, arriving at the park boundary barely after the sun had been swallowed by the hungry mountains.  The fluorescent yellows of spectacularly dying leaves stood out even in the gathering darkness, popping from the landscape.

We woke the next morning to a bluebird sky and headed for Pyramid Lake, driving up serpentine mountain roads painted with the golden sunlight that can only be produced by autumn mornings.  An utter lack of wind left the pothole lakes almost as smooth as mirrors, perfectly reflecting every detail of the scenery back upon itself.

The road from Jasper to Banff is fancifully called the Icefield Parkway, and it’s been named one of the most beautiful drives in the world.  It climbs high into the mountains, winding through glacier-carved valleys towards sprawling mats of extant glaciers.  The views were stunning and ever-changing, but the vehicle pulloff points are strangely placed and often it’s impossible to stop anywhere long enough to capture some of the incredible vistas on film.  The endless hills are carpeted in long-distance bikers taking in the views at a slower pace, and although I envied their more vivid experience, I loved my car for effortlessly hauling me up the endless hills.

Our first stop was at Athabasca Falls, one of the many waterfalls hidden deep within these peaks.  I often find the river-carved canyons more interesting than the falls themselves.  I stared at the rounded cliffs and tried to wrap my disbelieving brain around how long it must have taken this to form, how many tiny stones rubbing against the unforgiving rock to wear it down.

Three photographers in one car driving through one of the most stunning landscapes in the world leads to a lot of abrupt braking, parking in questionable places, and shouts of “stop!” in order to capture the perfect viewpoint.  Every night we compared the statistics of how many photographs we’d each taken that day; the record was somewhere around 450 by one person in one day.  We were constantly switching out memory cards and batteries, because we knew that no matter how hard we tried, we would never be able to perfectly commit to memory the exact angle of that mountain, the placement of those golden larches, the sensual curve of the river that might look completely different in a month or a year.

In early afternoon we finally reached the Columbia Icefield, an enormous swath of glaciers that you can literally walk right up to.  I’d been awed by the raw power of calving glaciers in the Alaskan sea fifteen years before, but here it seemed they were almost gently slumbering.  We walked across a rocky and barren moonscape, the path bordered by thin nylon ropes and signs warning us that to straying could cause the ground to give way and we could die of hypothermia in a glacial fissure before park authorities would be able to dig us out.  Not particularly wanting to meet my end this way, I stayed where they suggested, traversing flat boulders bearing deep striations from gargantuan glaciers grinding against their faces.

Clouds that had loomed at the horizon all day began to move in as we began our final hike of the day up to Parker Ridge, a heavily switchbacked trail that quickly led us above the treeline.  My lungs began to complain about the lack of oxygen as I crested the ridge, only about 2200 m (7200 feet) but high enough for my unaccustomed body.  A sweeping valley filled with nothing but the Saskatchewan Glacier and its turquoise meltwater spread out far below us, the only sound provided by the chilly wind howling across bare rock.

We spent the night in a small campground sandwiched between the lonely highway and one of the park’s ubiquitous turquoise rivers.  We shivered under multiple blankets that were barely able to stave off the chill of the 4 degree air (40 F) as a steady rain drummed against the roof of our tent, the sound morphing strangely as my mind wavered on the edge of a dream.

The rain stopped just before sunup The sunshine held out just long enough for us to reach the viewpoint over Peyto Lake.  Incredibly, each body of water we passed possessed its own unique shade of turquoise; some were almost emerald, some jade, others seeming to glow with teal.  Physically the color is caused by fine rock powder scraped off by glaciers as they move, but my mind seemed to reject this hypothesis and insisted the answer was more along the lines of magic.

The rain finally closed in and chased us down the road to Lake Louise, a pocket-sized town with little more to offer than a few shops and hotels.  We settled in to wait out the weather in our respective ways, gratefully sipping hot coffee and voraciously using up the cafe’s free WiFi to reconnect ourselves with our own far-flung corners of the world.

We didn’t want to miss Moraine Lake and Lake Louise so we eventually headed out again despite the fact that the rain didn’t want to quit.  Impossibly, blue holes opened up in the sky to mirror the ones in the ground, but the sun never did manage to break through again.

Our very last stop on the trip was to Emerald Lake, which we decided to circumnavigate.  We followed a long line of moose hoofprints down the mucky path, wandering up the rocky morraine that kept the water in its place and through the boggy river that filled the lake.  The blues of the water stayed muted thanks to the lack of light, but the trail was nearly deserted and the perfect reflections of the newly snowy mountains made me trip over more than one errant tree root in the path.

I’m slowly learning to enjoy Canada, although love might be a slow thing to come.  The mountains will doubtless end up as my haven in the coming year, offering calm and quiet whenever city life becomes too overwhelming.  Let’s just hope that autumn sticks around a while longer and keeps the snow at bay, because I’m just not quite ready to learn winter camping yet (sorry Dad!).