Water Features

While I encourage everyone to take a look at the following links, they’re only photos, just ghosts of the glories you see with your own eyes at these places.

Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks. The Canadians were so impressed by a view from a feature called the Rockpile near Moraine Lake that a representation of it used to appear on the back of nation’s $20 bill. We opted for seeing this lake instead of the nearby, and probably more crowded, Lake Louise, since it was late afternoon and we were running out of energy.

Moraine Lake was crowded enough, but for good reason. It was a short but steep walk up from the parking lot to the top of the Rockpile, which is a large agglomeration of rocky earth either created by an ancient avalanche, or the remains left by glaciers that used to cover the area. In any case, it overlooks one end of the lake, with the blue water—really blue, so blue I can’t quite remember it in my mind’s eye, I so rarely see anything like it—stretching out under a procession of high peaks. Those were the ten peaks, though I didn’t count them.

Peyto Lake. Another mountain lake, considerably further up the road from Moraine Lake and at the end of a somewhat longer walk, some of it on a fairly steep grade. I was worried that Lilly wouldn’t want to finish the walk, but she found amusement in seeking out some of the footpaths that branched off from but ultimately paralleled the paved path.

Even without a scenic vista at the end, this would have been a good walk, through a partly wooded, heavily flowered landscape. Indian paintbrush along the way, so vivid in warm reds, was a favorite, but there were many more blooms in other colors whose names I didn’t know, not that it mattered. According to one of the interpretation signs, flowers this high in altitude make the most of their short blooming season with profuseness, and it showed in July.

Peyto was an even more ethereal blue than Moraine, an irregular patch of blue among the earth hues of the surrounding mountains. We were at such a high perch that we could see not only the entire outline of the lake and mountains in the distance for many miles, but also the source of the lake—a glacier. Meltwater comes off the glacier in almost a flat sheet, rather than rivulets or waterfalls, and slides into Peyto.

Which must make it an exceptionally cold lake, even in high summer. I’m certain that people have visited the lake, and crossed in boats, and even taken icy lunatic plunges into it occasionally, but when I saw it, no one was around. There were no roads to it, and no visible structures, which compared nicely with the development around Moraine.

From my view, Peyto looked remote, so much so you could imagine a time before any human being had ever visited, even paleo-Indians. Then again, the area was probably covered completely with ice back before people crossed the Bering Strait, but that kind of chronological thinking has no place when you’re being awed by something.

Athabasca Falls. A mighty river, the Athabasca. I became acquainted with it on this trip. It rises from the Columbia Icefield within Jasper NP, gathers tributaries along the way, and flows into the distant Lake Athabasca in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, which itself eventually empties into the Arctic Ocean. So every time I saw the Athabasca, I saw water destined for the Arctic. Not the vast Pacific, which needs no more water, nor the Atlantic by way of the greedy Mississippi, but the remote, nearly unimaginable Arctic.

The Athabasca also served as a highway for Indians, Hudson’s Bay Co. men, and other assorted entrepreneurs and explorers of early Canada, so it’s a river with echoes of both prehistory and history. And it’s fast, at least in Jasper NP. I’m used to the sluggish rivers of the Midwest, not swift currents like the Athabasca.

At one point near the Icefields Parkway, the entire weight and energy of this river suddenly come to a precipice and fall more than 60 feet. Yuriko stared at the falls for a long time and offered the thought that this was much more impressive than Niagara Falls, and I see her point. Niagara is a circus lion. Athabasca is the thing in the wild.