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| Me, cold but chuffed on an actual glacier (Apologies for the weird vignette, my camera lens is being terrible) |
On Monday night we went to
karaoke at The Pit on campus which was amusing. At one point there was a load of fratboys who
impressed no one by piling onto the stage like So Solid Crew. We ordered
poutine to share which was damn tasty, and just before we left a guy who’s also
from UEA did an amazing growly rendition of All Along the Watchtower.
Classes were the usual mixture of
awesome and angering and depressing, particularly given that one piece of
reading was the Amnesty International report ‘Stolen Sisters’ which is a huge
compilation of stats and case studies on abused, murdered and missing
Indigenous women in Canada. In a nutshell, the figures are staggering,
absolutely horrifying. And Stephen Harper that same week said this issue was ‘not
on his priority list.’ I imagine at some point I will write a separate series
of posts about current events and politics in Canada, because there is so very
much to say.
On the other hand, my modernism
teacher continued pootling along in his eccentric way. His first tangent was telling
us he hangs around outside cinemas so he can ask people what they thought of
the films they watched because no one reads books on buses any more. Then later
he suddenly told us how much James Joyce loved his own fingers because he’s
always showing them off in photographs. I did a search and he does often put
his hands in prominent positions…
On Wednesday Ellen, Andrea and I
got up early for FREE PANCAKES and we queued twice and it was great. Sadly when
we reached the front of the queue they stopped letting people administer their
own syrup, and the most miserly guy took over before monitoring the girl who
took over from him.
Not much of note happened the
rest of the week until we went to lovely Banff National Park up in Alberta...
We caught the coach at 6pm, and
basically what followed was a pretty hellish experience of trying to sleep for
12 hours and not succeeding. I spent a lot of the night staring at the pitch
blackness surrounding the coach and feeling a bit weird, with the occasional
headlamps of oncoming cars floating towards us. Ironically I only felt
sleepy about fifteen minutes before we reached Banff. I perked up when the
rising sun started to illuminate the huge mountains towering along the
roadside.
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| A big ol'train |
The bus station and info centre
where we got off the coach was right next to an open railroad, and a huge
freight train roared past which I can only describe as looking and sounding American.
Alberta being further north and inland, the temperatures were a lot colder than
Vancouver.
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| Cheeky squad pic in the middle of the road |
We then headed to our hostel, the
Samesun, which is definitely for young travellers looking to drink beer
together in the hostel bar. And, y’know, hike and such. We stored our luggage
and headed to a restaurant next door for bacon and maple syrup pancakes which
were glorious but for some reason served next to a pile of fried potatoes.
Thus stuffed we moseyed around
town for a bit. The town of Banff itself is very small, with one main shopping
street, and is quite touristy. We wandered along Bow River and then found the
Buffalo Nations Museum which was pretty tastelessly, in my opinion, designed
like an Old West fort. We didn’t go to it in the end because it was $10 and
just seemed to be a small hall filled with mannequins of First Nations people
sitting outside wigwams.
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| One of the views from our tiny bean of a mountain |
Then we climbed Sleeping Buffalo
Mountain (or ‘Tunnel Mountain’ as the settlers named it) which was hard although
it’s meant to be the easiest peak in that area. We got a lovely view of the
valley and surrounding mountains. Strangely there really wasn’t a lot of
wildlife at all. I had been expecting to see a lot more birds but apart from
several magpies and a hovering buzzard, no luck.
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| A cool tree |
We went back into town and bought
some amazing popcorn before returning to the Samesun for showers, grabbing a
margarita in the bar (they have different drinks specials every day of the
week) and going to a nice brewery for dinner. We went to bed early as we were
all shattered and had to be up early for our tour tomorrow, despite the allure
of karaoke and value tequila in the hostel bar.
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| Some mountain near our hostel |
The weather on Sunday was
miserable but we still had fun. Our minibus picked us up at 8.15am and we piled
on. The tour guide, Nate, gave us some information as we travelled towards the
lakes and higher peaks of Banff National Park. He added in a fair few Aboriginal
names and histories of places which was good.
The Trans-Canada Highway cuts
through lots of natural habitats, through which animals are of course inclined
to move, so when the roadkill got too high overpasses and underpasses were
built exclusively for the wildlife. We passed Castle Mountain, which is pretty
epic-looking and includes Eisenhower Tower, which wasn’t called that for a
while because Eisenhower did something I can’t remember to offend Canadians.
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| Lake Louise |
Our first stop was Lake Louise,
which is an extremely beautiful tourist hotspot where a massive luxury hotel
has been built. The intense blue of the lake is typical of the lakes in this
area, a result of mountain particles stripped away by the movement and melting
of ice. These particles emit several colours, all of which are absorbed apart
from blue, which is reflected. That’s a very brief and probably erroneous
explanation because I really don’t have a memory for scientific knowledge or stories
about Eisenhower.
We took a load of pictures,
mooched around the hotel gift shop, looked at the hotel workers’ funny
Swiss-mountaineer-style uniforms, and returned to the bus late because we all
needed the loo and coffees at the last minute. Nate told us how the hotel
workers wear those uniforms because silly visitors used to get lost in mountain
storms and fall down gorges so they enlisted lots of Swiss guides. Probably because
they’d pissed off and/or killed off the original inhabitants who might also
have helped by this point.
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| Peyto Lake |
The next stop was Peyto Lake,
also stunning blue. The viewing point was high up so we were able to see the
point where the silt filters into the lake before appearing blue. On returning
to the bus I saw some of the group looking into the trees and shrieking at
something small and fluffy [understandably] running away from them. Turns out
it was a li’l chipmunk scurrying along with a mushroom in its mouth. If I’d
seen that my life would be complete.
The next notable stop was the
high point – literally – of the tour: the Althabasca Glacier in the Columbia
Icefields. We were piled on coaches for about 5 minutes taking us from the
tourist centre to the ice buses, which are very leaky and 60s-looking and had
massive tires. Because the majority of people on our bus were Japanese, the
tour info was given in Japanese, so we were bewildered by the odd burst of
laughter and at one point the alarming sight of all the people in front of us
suddenly standing up sounding shocked as if something bad had happened. That
went unexplained.
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| Going up the glacier |
The glacier itself was absolutely
beautiful. The higher you go, the bluer the ice. We were allowed to get out
after the comforting announcement that we were stepping out of the bus ‘at our
own risk.’ It was, as you’d expect, freezing. There was an unpleasant sleet
battering into us on the icy wind. We filled our bottles from the stream and
shuffled around very carefully on the slippery surface. I hate walking on ice
back home so it was quite unnerving, but also an incredible experience.
It was strange to be standing on
top of this beautiful, solid thing which to my mind looms monolithically as
some kind of mythical, far away object, a symbol in the global imaginary of
environmental instability and our carelessness of it.
Unsurprisingly, the information
we were given in English on the way back down included nothing about glacial
recession or climate change in general. That’s not really a selling point for a
company selling tickets for massive chugging glacier coaches. Nate gave us some
cheery facts back on the bus, such as the prediction that there will probably
be no glaciers left in North America by 2100, which is desperately sad in
itself but also scary in that 90% of North America’s drinking water comes from
glaciers. Not to mention the ol’rising sea levels globally. Looks like we’re
all in for a wild ride lads.
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| Bow Lake |
On the way back, altitude fatigue
set in as we’d been warned and most of us slept. There was one last stop at Bow
Lake, which curves around a huge mountain, before returning to Banff where we
were dropped off at the Samesun. We had dinner there and a nice pint of local
Beaver Beer before getting back on the bus for 12 more hours of psychological
purgatory broken up by breaks in depressing fluorescent-lit overnight gas stations.
I don’t know if I can fully
explain how it feels to be surrounded by such staggeringly huge mountains.
Their peaks just kept rising higher and higher into the mists. Symbols won’t do
it justice. A photo does not convey that crushing and euphoric sensation of
smallness you get, and words are terribly inadequate after all. I’m trying very
hard, you can probably tell. I don’t want to be too cheesy but I just kept
thinking of a line from one of my favourite songs, Holocene by Bon Iver, ‘And at once I knew/I was not magnificent.’ To
stand at the bottom of a mountain, at the edge of a vast azure lake or in the
shadows of a swathe of massive pines is to be humbled, to fully realise your
own transience.
Anyway, enough babbling. My point
is I'm fairly keen on mountains. Banff was absolutely worth the 24-hour-plus round trip and it’s a shame we
didn’t have more time there. I would highly recommend going if you happen to
find yourself in Alberta.
______________________
If you're interested, this is Holocene. The video's very appropriate:
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