Jasper, Alberta June 18, 2978

Yesterday I sat for a time just watching clouds.  I watched how they dispersed and regrouped, melting into one another, or breaking off and forming their own discrete entities – lonely little cloudlets all on their own, or gaggles of them in happy sky harmonies.  Magical shape-shifters.  Is that an elephant? There – there’s an ear, a trunk.  And over there, a bird?  

I see an eagle, wispy white wings outstretched, their tips trailing off into nothingness.  

Clouds of so many different colours and textures – those thin white stripes like jet trails, but not, streaking across the sky; the thick more grey-white billowy-pillowy clouds that look, probably deceptively, soft and inviting; the darker grey and blue-grey clouds that hang heavy, water-logged and vaguely threatening.   I watched as some little white puff-balls leapt and bounded over the high mountain peaks.  Or was it that the mountains were pushing them up? Or sometimes pulling those wispy cloud bodies apart like a kid with cotton candy.  I wonder what it feels like to be those clouds, pushed and pulled apart, or caught like a kite, and hanging there, captive in the cold embrace of the mountain.  

 

This morning I drove the Columbia Icefields road – in a snow storm.  I had to stop for a couple of hours – although the road conditions were passable, the visibility was poor, and didn't feel particularly safe for driving, although most other drivers sailed on by me as I sat and waited the storm out.  

But when the skies cleared, I was able to complete the drive under a reasonably bright sky.  I could only imagine what it might have been like in the sun - undoubtedly an even more  spectacular drive through a very rugged, high elevation mountain scape. 

I stopped at the Athabasca Glacier and tried to climb it, but didn’t reach the top – vivid memories of my recent ill-advised snow-walk haunted my every step.  Today, caution seemed the better part of valour.  

At the bottom (above) and part way up (below).

 

I am awed by these monolithic rocks, the Great Canadian Rockies.  I like to take the time to sit and really appreciate their individual characters – their chiseled-out faces, snowy head-dresses, thick and sheer cliff necks, rock-strewn shoulders and fat forested midriffs.  And watching the patterns on their facades as their colours and contours change with the shifting light, the shadows cast, revealing new lines, new cracks and ridges.  They each have such distinct personalities – some heavy and stolid, like old warriors; others light and airy, reaching for the sky; and still others sharp, dark and menacing, like young rebellious pirates rattling sabres.  They can feel warm or cold, friendly or overbearing.  Here I am hemmed in by mountains, and feel alternately protected, or trapped, by their presence. There is no ‘getting away’ from them.  I wonder about the formation of each individual mountain, the violent thrusting up of rock that was their birth, and the gentler erosion of wind and weather that continue to shape their form and character.  I’d like to know more about the geological processes, the awesome, awe-ful forces that have shaped, and still do shape, our world. So much to learn, explore, discover.  

 

Discover Canada.  Discover Yourself.  It seems, each day, I do a little of both.  It’s a never-ending journey into the unknown.