Alpine Tundra

I don’t ride on cable cars that often, and there aren’t many fatal cable-car accidents, so it’s a fairly safe bet that I’ll eventually die from something a lot more ordinary than a snapped cable-car line, such as the Big Elephant stepping on my chest.

Still, when I’m riding a cable car I can’t help but wonder about the sturdiness of that single cable that holds everything up, including whatever’s left of my lifespan. I can’t call it fear, since I board cable cars without hesitation, just a heightened awareness of contingency. Especially when the car crosses over the wheels of a support tower and bumps and wobbles.

The Jasper Tramway cable-car service is the easy way up Whistler’s Mountain, a peak near Jasper Townsite. It’s a steep ride, rising more than 3,000 feet (just under 1,000 meters), but even so it doesn’t take you to the top of the mountain, only most of the way up, well above the tree line. It’s also a tight ride, since the cars are fairly small, and about 20 people at a time jam in. It helps to be tall if you want to see the view of the mountainside glide by, first the spiky treetops, then rock rubble above the treeline.

If I wanted to rave about the view from Mt. Whistler, I could. I’d switch on the scenic-view adjective generator, and out would come fantastic, amazing, extraordinary, that sort of thing, but that doesn’t help readers visualize very well. Try this, then: Imagine standing on rocky soil rolling down and away from your feet (with some boulders thrown in), then imagine everything else you see is mountains, because it’s a fairly clear day. Some peaks are snow- and glacier-capped, others brown, others tree covered, yet others hazy in the distance, just mountain after mountain after mountain. I hadn’t seen anything like it since I took a funicular up the side of one of the mountains near Innsbruck.

The cable-car terminus, as I mentioned, wasn’t at the top. But rocky, dusty, seemingly barren trails lead from there to the top. We knew that Lilly and Ann wouldn’t want to make the climb. So Yuriko and I took turns going only part way up, a wise decision, because it probably would have taken each of us an hour to make the climb and come back, and it isn’t a good idea to leave your partner so long with children who have little to do.

I went up a few hundred more feet, taking necessary rests because I’m a fat man, and the sun was strong. Of course I continued to enjoy the mountain view. But more than that, I discovered the alpine tundra. The trail wasn’t barren at all.

Probably I saw alpine tundra in the Alps, on that same hike above Innsbruck. But I don’t remember, and I wouldn’t have known much about it anyway. I once imagined that tundra, either the Arctic or the alpine variety, was a sort of moss that covered everything. I still don’t know a lot about tundra, but I do know that it encompasses a wild variety of plants, a sort of forest in miniature.

And so it was on the side of Mt. Whistler. Once I started looking at the patches of tundra here and there along the trails, I started noticing all sorts of plant varieties, greenery as well as itty-bitty flowers, colorful but lost in the grays and browns of the mountain, unless you were paying attention.