BANFF
ICE
LANDSCAPES
ALPINISTS FIND PLACES IN TIME MATCHING THE ONCE IN A LIFETIME ADVENTURE
NATURE
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
W
hite serrated edges in the crystal clear blue sky set off a place as afar into natural history as just about anywhere that could be imagined.
Where the sun marks the snow on jagged mountain peaks, once an ocean reflected the changing night stars and the differing phases of the moon.
Then glaciers formed and eventually ever so gradually began retreating and grinding and retreating against the delicate mountains that had slowly risen from below the surface.
This majestic landscape is such a grand place in natural time that in certain places the crackling of the night fire made by nomadic indigenous tribes can be heard in time with the whistle of the first iron horse chugging up the grade as the bull elk crashes away through the dense forest of lodgepole pine.
Once there though, Banff National Park set inside the Canadian Rockies cuts a piece 6,641 square meters near the Continental Divide.
Snow falls and the lakes and river canyons freeze up from days and nights of ice cold winter hours only for the early spring thaw to melt the frozen cascading canyons into running mountain rivers again, with waters flowing west through the tributaries all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and still other waters flowing toward the Eastern Seaboard.
Visitors this year are definitely not the first to be in this place God created, but for sure they will benefit from a setting groomed to a state somewhere between pristine rugged wilderness and posh five star international living at world class resorts.
The 320 km four lane freeway between south and north park gates cuts through the serrated mountain chains pushed up from the Earth’s core by the slow grinding power of plate tectonics, at times simultaneously creating and destroying below the surface over 600 million years in God’s cauldron.
When the rocks eventually made their way up, the harsh natural erosion found only in the highest heavens turned the mountains into every shape one could imagine rocks could be sculpted into by the wind, the rain, the snow and ice and, the even more powerful, eventual spring thaw.
Before, after and in between, glaciers ever so gently ground parts of the mountains into rounded shapes, like the snow cone appearance of the Hoodoos, while leaving glacier flour at the bottom of the lakes that filter into the water the distinct colors of the natural settings.
The process was complicated and slow. The rocks were folded in on themselves and broken for millions of years below the surface. And once on top, quite often the more delicate layers on the inside gave way until the harder outer surface broke off, leaving ever so often, the sharp exteriors of castles.
Banff National Park never looks like a uniform shaped Lego set because of this violent incremental processing that affected different rock formations differently.
The geology of the Canadian Rockies may be quite a bit more complicated than that, but the windows of the soul can see for themselves just what the end results have come to so far.
But, and this is a big but, you have to get to the Canadian Rockies first before you can see for yourself that the sedimentary rocks patiently broke through the surface of the Earth to display a bit of God’s grandness and a bit of majesty.
I’ll tell ya’ all straight up though, before you start heading this way, that ‘this ain’t my first rodeo.’
Calgary has an international airport that can accommodate the flow of traffic from everywhere, with shuttle service available to whisk the recent arrivals away just under two hours to the park along an impressive four lane freeway kept drivable by maintenance crews in all types of weather conditions.
Albertans know from experience how to host the international travelling elite after staging the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988. Calgary built a bobsled track and training facility just for such a purpose, that turned out to be not too unlike the bucking broncos of the Calgary Stampede, where Alberta hosts the oil barons, ranchers and cowboys for one of the better wild west rodeos every summer, with the big hard sun overhead.
Albertans may be tough in the rodeo ring and on the bobsled run but they, to be quite honest, tend to be kind of sweet on me, having facilitated an advanced degree from the University of Alberta Law School, but only when I got run out of my home Province of British Columbia.
The sweet eventually turned to sour, though, and I had to take my chances back home.
Albertans are certain the town is theirs, but the oil barons and the cowboys chasing the boom and bust economies of the wild west will let visitors stay as long as they remain respectful to their territory.
If you get in late at night and can’t make the trip all the way to the lodgings inside Banff National Park, you can make the short drive into Calgary to the east or the even better choice may be straying west toward the mountain town of Canmore established near the park gate for just such a purpose.
You don’t have to tie up your horse in Canmore though, as much as you have to find a place to power up the long charge electric vehicle in ‘Cowtown’ as Calgary has been quite affectionately known, for the way stray cattle would wonder through the city streets grazing on the urban gardens. (Oh gosh, I just ran out my welcome in Alberta). No, Cowtown is called cowtown as the cattle ranching central to rival Wichita, Kansas and Dodge City.
Canmore though is no second cousin, being the site of the Three Sisters and the Goat Range, stark examples of sedimentary rock formations, set in the very near distance along the Bow River that runs alongside the mountain town.
Everything got started of course with a public transit bus trip from the West End of Vancouver to the Canada Line Skytrain Station at Yaletown.
I don’t really feel like one of the first alpinists that explored the park boundaries before Banff was declared a national park in 1860. The adventure, though, really begins when making my way through airport security and finding the departure gate.
A Nexus Card helps at Vancouver/YVR but the security contractors at Calgary/YYC don’t really care about Trusted Traveler Status.
Albertans are Albertans first and then Canadian, there’s no doubt about that, and having Banff within their territory only highlights that provincialism.
A bit of the wild west survives the old ranching days, with the international airport security not believing everyone, including their mirror selves, until proven otherwise among the wilderness and saloons made viable with money made from ranching and farming the wheat fields and from oil.
Canada does have other spectacular national parks, but Alberta has spectacular Banff and the beautiful Bow River Valley.
That the national railroad from Montreal came through here and made Banff and the grand hotels of Banff Springs and Lake Louise into the travel destination meccas that they have now become changes the perspective very little for Albertans.
The Swiss alpine guides brought in from Europe to work the mountains in the late 1800s came before the park rangers created trails and campgrounds but they without a doubt decidedly only came after the Stoney Indians and the tribes of the Dakota Sioux had already wondered the high and low and middle earth hunting and gathering and just moving about perhaps earlier than the 1790s.
Further natural historical evidence suggests stone age hunters found Banff once the blue ocean waters receded. The ocean left behind the fossils of ancient oceanic creatures embedded inside the rock quarried for the hotel construction. And then the land animals came, and the people followed after them for that hard sought after meal.
Alberta has always held a special place in Confederation after having made peace with the 5 Nations of the southern territories between 1871 and 1877. Treaty 7 ceded ownership of the lands to the government in exchange for reserve land and the right of the nomadic tribes to go on about hunting and fishing on traditional territory. Canada created 11 treaties with indigenous populations in all the land between 1871 and 1921.
The future park boundaries would be cut inside of the traditional lands of the Iyarje Nakoda Nations of Chiniki, Wesley and Bearspaw. And the park reflects still today that careful balance of individual rights and attitudes of respect toward the environment and Mother Earth, and all the human and animal spirits that make their home there from.
This peace enabled the railway to unite the provinces as one singular new nation, and for the Banff Springs Hotel to grow up out of this life and times of the early years with railway executives carving fortunes from the frontier as the noisy giant iron horse moved across Canada from the trading port of the St Lawrence Seaway at Montreal.
Prime Minister John A. Macdonald initially protected 10 square miles around the hot springs at Banff on November 15, 1885. Much more was still to come with tourists already visiting by rail during the Spring of 1884.
Macdonald would see for himself the wonders the great new nation had protected on a visit in 1886. The national park boundaries were quickly extended 61 km north to include Lake Louise and Moraine Lake in 1902.
And then ever so much more, as the stories of the great natural historic beauty grew around the world, the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks eventually became protected internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984, 99 years after the national park designation.
The TransCanada Highway #1, that is also the Banff parkway, has joined the nation the way the Canadian Pacific Railway once did along a 7,476 km route through all ten provinces since 1962.
Park rangers had to continue the build out to protect wildlife from motor vehicle traffic by constructing a delicate, almost invisible fence line along the four lane parkway with overpasses for the wild animals that include elk, cougar, grizzly bear, black bear, big horn sheep, mountain goats and moose.
I saw a family of 8 elk or maybe was it 6 elk walking across the frozen river to graze, including a buck hiding camouflaged amongst the day’s meal ticket along the Bow River in Canmore without much effort, and, with much less effort, driving in a car, a pair of big horn sheep staunchly positioning themselves on steep sedimentary rock just a few hundred meters from the highway heading into Calgary.
White people and railway investors had toured into the area since the Royal Geographical Society Palliser expedition was led into the wild, natural surroundings by Doctor Hector in 1857.
Legend describes that day when Doctor Hector’s horse kicked him in the chest, and the water beside them became known as Kicking Horse River, while the powerful iron horse would wind down fast and hard through Kicking Horse Pass into the Province of British Columbia in 1883.
The town centers at Banff and Lake Louise grew around the railway stations. And the hotels were part of a destination resort chain built by railway executives to increase the corporate footprint as the nation was linked together from east to west, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.
Banff Avenue has this glorious mile of restaurants, pubs and mountain apparel stores through town where the clop clop of horse hooves is a distant memory but Sulphur Mountain abutting the town to the North would not have gone unnoticed by the dignitaries of proceeding generations.
Visitors can ride the Banff gondola to a staging area on Sulphur Mountain where there has been constructed a viewing platform, a boardwalk as well as a high mountain lodge for dining at a spectacular elevation.
The Banff Springs Hotel opened in 1888. And the first chalet at Lake Louise was completed in 1890. But despite being 5000 feet above sea level, the natural elements were not the only hazards people needed to protect their investments from as a fire quickly razed the wooden structure built by Canadian Pacific Railway General Manager William Van Horne at Banff Springs. Fire would again destroy a second edition of the Banff Hotel. And then eventually another fire also destroyed the Chalet at Lake Louise in 1923.
The Banff Hotel would be rebuilt in short order though, in time, or so the railway executives hoped, for the next tourist season, with the Rundle Stone shaped and formed by the ancient ocean quarried just one kilometer from the hotel footprint destroyed and left in burning embers. A second quarry was opened up in Canmore at the base of Mount Rundle in the 1890s.
The limestone reflects an inner blue tinge colored by the ancient ocean, but then the rocks turn brown in the sunlight of the alpine sky as the big hard sun dramatically arcs down across the Great Continental Divide.
Coal mines were also dug for fuel to keep the settlers warm during the cold winter nights.
Adding to the excitement, the railway company promoted the hotel by inviting early Hollywood stars to visit, such as Ginger Rogers and John Barrymore.
Banff Springs and Lake Louise are great destinations for the movie stars and the wedding parties of the international elite, but don’t forget to bring your snowboard, beanie and goggles.
Banff has three ski resorts beside a second national park area also dotted by ski resorts in Yoho National Park and the Kootenays.
Sunshine Valley provides a footprint at the very top for skiers and snowboarders, with gondola assist, while Lake Louise is set back behind the hotel overlooking Victoria Mountain and Lake Louise.
Sunshine Valley has a long parkway but the base lodge has a gondola nearby to make up lost time and take visitors to the top where more chair lifts take skiers in every other direction, including up to the top of black diamonds.
From the mid-station, snowboarders have an easy time of getting started with several beginner and intermediate runs on or about and under the lifts.
I always like to do about 30 minutes to one hour of limber up runs, but me not knowing the mountain took a wrong turn and ended up bumping and grinding almost right away on the first run of the day, on a day that began at about 10 am after patiently waiting to rent snowboard equipment and to buy tickets and finding the gondola for uploading.
Never being on the mountain before is exciting, but to be honest, familiarizing oneself with even a midsize mountain can take the best parts out of the day. I would definitely have had a better time on the second day, but time being fleeting as it is, I moved on after the first day.
A large lodge for dining at mid-station has a big open ended patio area. I decided on a vegan TexMex burrito of some sort from a food trailer parked outside the lodge so I could feel the warm arcing sun on a cold day as the rest of the alpinists funnelled down from the hills for lunch.
Sunshine Valley has a great long ski out to the lower lodge and the parking area for the end of the day as I joined the many boarders and skiers racing the sun to the bottom through majestic rugged mountainscapes during an early winter day.
The Lake Louise ski lodge is near the parking area, but the main parking is limited, which may necessitate parking at angles along the parkway and a quick hike to the staging area with your equipment. Of course, this part is easier if you have to rent gear at the base lodge.
Lake Louise bends up and over to the black diamonds towering over the rest of the ski resort unseen in the background. A gondola uploads everyone to mid-station. And then a series of runs lead to several more chair lifts and eventually to the black diamonds up and over and then to the front again.
Mount Norque, I haven’t had a chance to get there yet.
Each ski resort has one substantial lodge for hosting a cafeteria and companion buildings for renting equipment. Singular in the purpose of accommodating skiers, snowboarders and backcountry alpinists, but complicated in that the resorts accommodate the family with green runs and also the extreme sport enthusiasts with impressive black diamonds that loom up above with the serrated edges of the rocky mountains in the background.
At the end of the day, the skiers and snowboarders can take the roads into the town center for après ski, unless you have that food and drink and happiness all planned out for your overnight stay in Canmore.
This five star area known as Banff sets up under the clear blue sky with the hotels and streets specially fit with fine dining restaurants that include menus with stylized treatment of that world caliber Alberta beef, grilled, flamed broiled with special melted sauce, or grilled but this time served in small tender cuts over a careful selection of oven roasted, sweat baby potatoes and herbs.
If you are lucky, a bit of buffalo meat might be on the menu as part of a fine dining burger selection after the Canadian herd was rescued and the numbers sufficiently increased to allow for the majestic animals to be once again farmed out and sold for the butcher block.
Fine dining in the resort includes vegetarian meals and the best Alberta ale on tap as well as the sweet wine bouquets of the world. The dining selections also include those menus from busy pubs that might push the ale a bit more than the meals of burgers and fries.
The winter is just the cold version of an expensive piece of ice, with the frozen lakes becoming almost an indistinguishable part of the snowed over park trails frozen in time.
The search for mountain reflection off clear water began at the Vermillion Lakes, then Lake Louise and then Moraine Lake . The search continued to the next morning at Lake Minnewanka.
The frozen water is neither the ancient ocean that stretched from the Arctic through monument Valley to the Gulf of Mexico, nor the giant glaciers that sculpted the sedimentary rocks and imprinted the land for water to collect into lakes.
Decidedly the wait for reflection would have to continue until the spring thaw and a warm return in the summer. To remember the beauty of the reflecting waters until then, I had to temporarily role back time to an October day at Lake Louise.
Banff has an ever more inviting version in the warm spring and summer days as the ice capped lakes melt to mirror the rocks massif, and the long backcountry trails open up for less risky summertime adventures.
And then, time finally stops for that beautifully satisfying walk-about under the changing early evening sky that more often than not leaves you at the end of the day with the impression that you have just been to the nearest place to that of heaven on earth.
