In Canada’s Kingdom of Ice

Steeling myself against fierce gusts of katabatic wind, I stood at the roof of the Rockies, gazing on a nest of glaciers, two thousand feet thick, which mantled Canada for millennia, when men still hunted with stone spears, when woolly mammoths, mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers roamed the earth.

Feels like an Antarctic expedition, only I’m in the Arctic, on the pole at the other end of the planet - and just a couple of kilometres from a highway, I thought, as I scrambled up a rocky moraine into the toe of the Athabasca Glacier. 

In the native lingo, Athabasca means “where bullrushes grow” because grass used to cover the place before snowfalls built up the giant, blue-shadowed, ice tongue for 10,000 winters. 

Feathery snow that wafted down mountain peaks and survived countless summers crystallized and compressed themselves into massive ice sheets. As more snow fell, the ice thickened and spilled downhill into the valleys, giving birth to glaciers.

Of course, Athabasca is just a tiny finger of the Columbia Ice Field, which spans the size of Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, and holds six major outlet glaciers. “Think of the ice field as the palm of your hand and your fingers as the glaciers,” the guide intoned as he bulldozed ahead of us.

A living, six-kilometer, viscous, white river, to be precise, only Athabasca is flowing imperceptibly slower at 400 feet per annum, advancing and retreating, cracking, melting and replenishing itself.

At my feet, meltwaters gushed from a crack – part of the hidden streams inside the Athabasca that join others to feed three great oceans – the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Arctic.

Panting from exertion, I bent down and scooped a handful of meltwater to my lips. I was surprised, not about how cold it was - that’s expected - but how fresh the ancient water tasted and how sweet.

Glacier-trekking resembles treading on greased, inclined glass. I was thankful the steel spikes of my crampons gripped the ice. No arguing I have to be on a guided hike though.  I’m not familiar with the treacherous terrain, which shifts in seconds. Of course, it could be a lethal adventure, so everyone signed waivers.

“Walk in a single file, please,” the guide barked at our group, his breath vaporizing before him in a cloud.  When I paused at the lip of a millwell to take a shot, he grasped the tail of my coat to make sure I don’t tumble inside the shaft.

As the glacier surface melts, water runs off in rivulets, gouging tunnels in the ice, spiralling down to bottomless depths.  Hikers lured to peek in their slippery mouths often fall in, never to be found.

Everywhere, death lurks in the raw breathtaking beauty of this frozen vastness. If you don’t get devoured by millwells, you can be swallowed up by crevasses, buried in an avalanche or struck down by collapsing seracs. 

Where the rivers of ice encounter cliffs and slopes, they buckle into a chaos of crevasses – fractures in the ice sheet hundreds of feet deep. When crevasses crisscross, they form pinnacles - seracs, which can collapse on unsuspecting climbers.

Signs planted on the glacier warned parents to hold on tight to their kids. 

Our guide recalled a 10-year old Japanese boy who ignored the warning and stepped inside a roped area. One step, that’s all it took. In a snap, the snow beneath him gave way and he plunged in a hidden crevasse. Rescuers fished him out in half an hour but he succumbed from hypothermia.

“At least, his folks got back his body,” the guide muttered. Normally, the glacier refuses to surrender its victims. “We haven’t even recovered those who died in the 1980s and 1990s.” 

Yet, deep in the heart of the kingdom of ice, I felt safe. This glacier won’t hurt me, I told myself.

Just a few hours ago, I had boarded the bus at Lake Louise, Banff for Jasper. Just two kilometres beyond the hamlet, the road started climbing the backbone of North America on the 232-kilometer Ice Fields Parkway, “The Road Through the Clouds”. 

The highway took me over the Great Divide – endless rows of the highest peaks in the Canadian Rockies stretching all the way to the U.S., past dozens of ice fields cradled on their saddles, atop 7,000-foot high passes - Bow Summit and Sunwapta, down glacier-fed turquoise lakes. 

It was one of the most scenic drives on earth.

We passed Hector Lake – the coldest in the Rockies, as it feeds from Vulture Glacier and the Waputik Icefield. Then Crowfoot Glacier, minus a toe, came into view. So much of its mass has melted away, it vaguely resembled the three talons of a crow, like it did when explorers named it long ago.

Bow Glacier, which created the Bow Valley and the Bow River as it retreated, came up next. “Bow” referred to the reeds which grew along its banks which native folks used to make bows for hunting buffaloes. 

Over Mistaya River Valley, Mt. Chepren loomed, a purplish beehive tower of dark limestone banded with dazzling white snow. 

Many peaks in the Rockies resembled pyramids. But in the last hundred years, they’ve called this one Pyramid Mountain until they realized Jasper Park has a peak with the same name. Quickly, they re-christened it as Chepren, after the son of Cheops, builder of Egypt’s Great Pyramid. 

For a while, our bus stopped at Bow Summit, the highest point crossed by a major highway in Canada. I grabbed the chance to hike up Peyto Lake viewpoint to gaze at the glacial pool nestled in the alpine wilderness of Mistaya Valley. 

Mistaya is the native word for “grizzly” and bears still roamed the area. But the lake and the glacier it feeds on took their names from “Wild Bill” - Ebenezer William Peyto, a former trapper, gold prospector and mountain guide turned park warden a hundred years back. 

Quite a character he was, too. In cowboy garb, with a white kerchief round his neck – probably a table napkin swiped from Banff Hotel – Peyto would barge in bars with a live lynx strapped to his back.

Banff was full of stables then and he guided people journeying from Lake Louise to Athabasca on horseback. It took one week, one-way, over rough paths strewn with fallen timber. And even in those days, people ventured on the glacier astride pack horses tied to each other.

Next, our bus pulled over at Mistaya Canyon, allowing me to revel in the sight of Snowbird Glacier spreading its wings across the face of Mt. Patterson.

On my way back from the Columbia Ice Field, I caught a glimpse of Stutfield Glacier tumbling down a 3,000–high massif to Sunwapta Falls where the river abruptly turns 90 degrees and plunges into a pot-holed limestone canyon. 

Sunwapta means “turbulent river” in Stoney Indian.

At Goat Licks Point above the Athabasca River, a herd of mountain goats lapped up the pale mineral-rich silt deposits with gusto. The calcium, sulphate and salt must work wonders for their coat.

Once sated, the goats doze off on the rock shelves of Mount Kerkeslin. Sometimes, you can even see eagles dive-bombing the baby mountain goats, trying to knock them off the cliff. 

On Cirrus Mountain, a series of waterfalls 2,000 feet high made the rock face seem to cry. Hence, they called it “Weeping Wall”. They even tossed in the name “Teardrop” for the main cataract. 

So many mountains, I thought. If I can only climb each of them, I’ll never mistake one for the other and remember all their names.

Last stop was Maligne Lake, which stretched past serene Spirit Island right to the melt-water channels of Coronet Glacier. 

Maligne is French for “wicked”. Native tribes knew it as Beaver Lake because beavers used to build their dams there. But many French settlers must have drowned in the turbulent river that flowed from the lake as it joined the Athabasca River.

Beside the highway, I spotted a grizzly sow with two cubs. Their fur was much lighter, almost creamy yellow ochre. The pudgy babies darted beneath their mom’s belly as she grazed in front of a dozen tangled cars, with tourists snapping away like there’s no tomorrow. 

“Another bear jam,” our guide sighed.

I sat back with a heavy heart as the endless miles of mountains and the sea of snow-capped peaks receded behind me. With much reluctance, I’m leaving Canada’s kingdom of ice. 

In a hundred years, geologists predict the ice fields and glaciers will be gone, melted away as the earth warms. But they will return with the next Ice Age in another 5,000 years. Once more, they will grind and carve the Rocky Mountains, gouge out valleys, feed the rivers and lakes, leaving moraines and alpine meadows on their wake.

My mind grappled with the immensity of time against which my life lasts shorter than a blink of an eye. No matter. I have touched the heart of a glacier. I’ve drank its waters. It’s part of me forever.

(For questions, comments, suggestions, etc. please contact the author at emmieabadilla@yahoo.com [1].)