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Published: December 31st 2011
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CANADA ON THE RAILS, WEST THRU THE ROCKIES
We woke up in Edmonton on Sunday morning, September 25, where our train was stopping for an hour to add another dome car for Rocky Mountain Viewing which was in our future today. While the various crews were getting this done, I did my constitutionals, at 6:30AM, walking fro and to, and to and fro, along our thirty car caravan, stationary for now outside the limits of the city airport strip.
The new dome hitched in, we were on our way, settled for a ride into the Rockies. We floated along, taking breads, tea, coffee and yogurt, self-served. As we travelled west, intending to veer south for the Rockies when they would come, a few wild horses made their way parallel to us. We registered that the conifers, in their greenery, were now ahead of deciduous in the battle for dominance of the forest around us. Pines and firs had now joined spruce and colour diffident tamaracks to out number poplars and birches, who, however, seemed intent on making up in colour variation what they were losing in numbers.
For me, this collage of nature's richness offered the promise of
continuing winter interest, in the presence of a lovely autumn setting, soothing the eyes, inner and outer, into quiet oneness with the passing scene.
And then they appeared.
The Rockies; ahead, off to the right, in the direction of the two pm hour. They burst upon us, through the foliage, in full majestic splendour.
Oh-My-God!, was my first reaction; a choked and guttural Wow, more cognate, I suppose, was my second. As for my co-viewers in the dome, a raspy exhalation in unison was their involuntary expression of collective awe.
As I struggled to focus on the mountain range revealing itself before me, it was as if some un-real gigantic sphinx had fallen backward into bed rest profile, up there, wrinkled forehead in deep concave, big knuckle jointed nose, open mouth deep and wide, huge chin rugged and sharp, long throated, expansive chest with a smooth dip to mid-riff, all formed in sharp and bold outline, in stark revealing ash-white splendour, cuddled in clouds, white and fluffy. I felt Lilliputian in the presence before me.
As we continued upward, it seemed that the behemoth now placed itself upright and was joined by a
small company of its brethren, breathless pillars of pristine power, in bold assertion of raw natural might, awesome to the point of frightening. And yet, there was a certain grace in the form and the style of the shapes presenting, such that function would be rendered null, if this were the work of humans; but, it was and is not.
As this vision of the mountains persisted, it engendered a sense of the spiritual, the ephemeral, an in-body experience that put my mind and feelings in concert for a magical moment.
The Rockies continued their stunning show of geography, ever there in the foreground, as we viewed other highlights of the day: The Athabasca river beginning its gracious flow from within these mountains in an enchanting glaze of blue born of sunlight dancing over its silt laden bed; Jasper, a pretty little town in the midst of a stunning national park of woods, accessible only by horse and train until 1911; Moose Lake, seven by three kilometres in area, and of unfathomable depth; Mount Robson, almost thirteen thousand feet above the sea, playing coy today, behind its own weather system, governed by the mixing of hot air
from below and cold air resident on its table top; Mount Terry Fox, in honour of the brave young man and his Marathon of Hope for a cure to cancer; Pyramid Waterfall, fed by the Albreda Glacier and cascading down, directly at us, a drop of three hundred feet; the Continental Divide, along the Alberta-British Columbia Border, from whence ground water flows east, Atlantic bound, if sourced east of the Divide, and west into the Arctic and Pacific oceans, if sourced on its West. They all made for exciting viewing as we rolled-on westward.
All that was left, after an Arctic Char dinner, was a retreat to one of the domes, where we drifted through the good night with a rare selection of night caps thoughtfully provided by our kind attendants, as we enjoyed the company of a cool coterie of friends we had made from Australia, Chile, Germany, the USA, and from Eastern, Central and Western Canada.
And, some time during the ensuing séance, night gave way to morning, we met up with the North Thompson, Thompson and South Thompson rivers and, finally, with the mighty Fraser, which guided us through our final mountains and
into Vancouver on the Pacific, where a light rain blessed our arrival.
V. Ernest Ainsley .
26 September 2011
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