Like an imaginary scape from a children’s book, the Canadian Rocky Mountains have long been the subject of purple prose. An understandable response when the landscape’s all symphony and strings — jagged, ice-capped peaks, verdant forests, glacial streams, gurgling hot-springs and mighty rivers. For many, the obvious way to experience nature’s Taj Mahal is to spend time in the much-vaunted National Parks of Yoho, Banff, Jasper and Kootenay.
But, while the National Parks beckon with promise of obvious reward, sometimes the getting there is as sweet. Highway 93, between the blue-green waters of Lake Louise and Jasper town, has not been re-christened Icefield Parkway or Promenade of the Glaciers, without good reason. All 230 km of the drive has my neck doing gymnastics. Here weeping waterfalls, there lakes so aquamarine they look photo-shopped, everywhere the chance sightings of nimble elk, sure-footed bear or moose.
You can do the drive in three hours, but if you’re a journey-over-destination traveller, you’d rather halt wherever you can to get a feel of the glaciers and hiking trails en route. The Athabasca Glacier is one such imperative halt, not least because in a world of geographical one-offs, it stands out as special. For those who came in late, it is one of the six-principle “toes” of the Columbia Icefield, which is the most monumental body of ice in the Canadian Rockies. Hard to compete with the statistics of an Icefield that covers 215 sq.km with solid ice estimated up to 1,200 feet in depth.
Tours for the intrigued and intrepid depart from the Columbia Icefield Glacier Discovery Centre every 15-30 minutes, in the diesel-powered All-Terrain Ice Explorer. For once, it’s not just the promise of monumental landscape that has me feeling no larger than a blip on life’s radar. Just standing besides the human-sized wheels of the Snow Coach (that looks as if it could get a role in Mad-Max) does it this time.
The rain is coming down like a sheet. I’m dressed like a self-regulating ecosystem (the temperature on the glacier is 15 degrees C lower than at the Discovery Centre). But that doesn’t stop me from keeping the window of the coach as wide open as it will go, to get the most unfiltered view. Guide Connor from Ottawa Ontario is as skilful at driving this monster truck on the glacier as he is with breaking the ice (if you’ll pardon the pun). The immediate landscape is one of stunted trees and shrubs. The lichen and moss, Connor tells us, are nutritious food sources for the big-horn sheep and mountain goats. They nibble at these treats with epicurean delight, displaying admirable ability to adapt to an extreme environment.
On this five-km journey, the transformation from shrub into ice and rock is as sharp as it is sudden. We’re now driving along one of the steeper, unpaved roads in the world, going at an 18-degree angle, into nature with all adjectives stripped away.
Beside the ice are glacially-formed accumulations of unconsolidated rock and debris called moraine; some particles as tiny as flour, others as large as boulders.
To step onto the ice, formed from snow as old as 200 years, is communion with a force more ancient. But nature as ever, is the great equalizer. With utter disregard of your income or golf handicap, it can be treacherous if you don’t play by the rules. Hidden crevasses have swallowed up those who’ve wandered off the straight-and-narrow, clearly demarcated zones.
If one were a landscape painter, the sky would be salmon-silver, the glacial streams cold-blue. We drink from a placid stream. We photograph what really is too beautiful to be captured. If time is on your side, linger on and take one of the later coaches back, just to stroll slowly around, boots crunching in the great white expanse, letting the glacier in.
Another way to get under the skin of the eco-system when you’re back at the Glacier Discovery Centre is to head out on the Skywalk. The glass-floor platform 280 mts above the valley floor, which extends 35 mts out from the edge of the cliff face, quietly beckons in the pewter-grey light of this rainy day. Despite all the skill of its construction, the interpretative columns it boasts, it is dwarfed by the landscape in which it’s set. For it’s really water that is the world’s greatest architect. In both frozen and liquid state, it has managed to shape and sustain the glacial-formed valleys, gushing waterfalls and a highly dependent community of plant and animal life.
Sonia Nazareth is a freelance writer and anthropologist.
