Plain of Six Glaciers

Two days in Alberta and it feels as if I never left: both the place, and the mess of stories that I spent most of my life telling myself about who I was and how I should move through this world.

Rio and Silas and I visited Drumheller and the Royal Tyrell Museum on Sunday, and after a great day together (spent mostly in the bathroom changing diapers) I dropped them with Kat and Andy in Canmore, and beat feet for Lake Louise. I wasn’t racing from the boyz, but from the crushing weight of being back in Canmore, and the memories it evoked.

Somehow I’ve slipped back into the belief that I don’t deserve success as easily as I slipped over the continental divide on Friday night.

Is it the place? Or the circumstances?

I rise on Monday morning still reeling. Time to drown this stupidity in a flash flood of endorphins. I wait for 20 minutes at Laggans Deli for a cup of tea and a slice of apple strudel. Some things will never change. Then I make for Lake Louise itself. For five summers, and a couple of winters in the early and mid 1990’s, Lake Louise was my home. I worked as a Naturalist / Interpreter for Parks Canada then, leading hikes along the shore of Lake Louise, and up the valley beyond called the Plain of Six Glaciers. I must have tramped the trail into the scene immortalized on a million post cards more than a hundred times, but I still consider it the best “bang for the buck” in the Rockies. Nowhere else can you so easily get into a recently glaciated alpine landscape with such majestic scenery. Its been more than ten years since I guided this trail, but striding out along the flat lakeshore, I remember every step of the way.

The first two kilometres are pan flat, and for a few minutes I fear that my sea-level legs and lungs might not be up for this run, which starts at more than 5500 feet. But when the trail starts to climb beyond the cliffs where I learned to rock climb a decade and a half ago, I feel myself settling into the familiar rhythm of trail running.

It’s a beautiful morning to be in the mountains, and I remember the first time fellow Park Naturalist Joel Hagen and I hiked this trail, in early May 1992. Deep snow still blanketed the entire valley then, in places 10 or 15 feet deep, so that we post holed up to our hips much of the way. Unwittingly, we crossed half a dozen avalanche slopes yet to “let go.” Our weight could easily have been the trigger. We joked again last night about the possible newspaper headlines: “Two young, stupid, park naturalists killed in avalanche first week on the job.”

There’s no snow on the trail this morning as I run up towards Mount Lefroy and Mount Victoria. In fact, in the ten years since I’ve been here, the glaciers that give the valley its name have noticeably retreated. How long will it be before this place becomes know as the Plain of Five Glaciers, and then Four, Three, Two....

The feeling of running in the mountains is euphoric, and for more than two hours I nearly forget my foolish troubles. Mountains have a way of doing that: they put our early difficulty into perspective. They dwarf our concerns with their stalwart grandeur.

I pass the tea house and run out the trail to the Abbot Pass lookout, dancing along the narrow edge of the lateral moraine that drops off two hundred feet to the debris covered Lower Victoria Glacier. At the lookout I sit alone and feel the sun on my face, feel the pulse of life through my limbs, feel the surge of endorphins (endolphins as a friend calls them) swimming through my system. It’s a good thing to alive on this earth.

The run down is pure bliss. My feet know every step, and my running on the rocky slopes of Mount Doug, Mount Work and the trails in the hills above Theatis Lake have given me intuitive footwork, so that I feel as through I am flying. The plod along the last two kilometres back to the menacing, penitentiary like Chateau is a test of willpower which I am glad to report I passed.

I spend the rest of the day visiting old friends. I finish the day with diner at the Lake Louise Hostel with good friends Jim and Jack, who I met the very first day I moved to the west more than fifteen years before, and who I have stayed close to, more or less, ever since. They are both in their early 60’s now, and it’s a stark reminder of the passage of time to be with them again in a place we’ve frequented for a decade and a half.

The passage of time. The belief in my deserving. The faith in my spirit as my central reference point. The ability to love unconditionally, even if it means letting go of the woman whom I love. The power of self referral, where my own spirit, and not people, places, or things become the root of my happiness in life.

These are the things that crossing the continental divide has dredged up. Its not the place really, it’s the man, this localized mass of energy and ideas and information that has brought these questions to the surface. And now, driving back to the west coast, playing a waiting game with love, I try to find the equanimity of self referral to calm my mind and gently numb the pain in my chest and return again to a place where I know that I deserve to succeed beyond my own wildest imagination.