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Hiking Abbott Ridge
Near Glacier House
One Step To The Future, One Foot In The Past
I Find Myself Wishing
Why I Sleep Well
This Is You Drawing
Notre Dame de Chartres
Chaos
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HIKING ABBOTT RIDGE
BY Derek MacNeill
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For more information on 'THE HIKER'S GUIDE TO ROGERS PASS," contact Derek MacNeill
Enjoy the journey!
ABBOTT RIDGE
Abbott Ridge is an outstanding day hike for the novice and seasoned backcountry hiker alike. It has something for just about everybody. A rich, rain forested valley floor, a rare sub alpine lake called Marion Lake and a glorious meadow that swells with alpine flowers in mid-summer. Hikers are generously rewarded with the sights and sounds of a chorus of marmots and migratory birds. And, there is, of course (trumpets please), The View. A sweep of Glaciers from the top of Abbott Ridge that dazzles everyone who sees them.
Abbott Ridge is the quintessential introductory hike to Glacier National Park. It has so much to offer the new hiker. If Abbott Ridge were the only hike in Rogers Pass, the area would still be renowned for its hiking and astonishing topography. But, it is just one of several hikes that represent the unique and diversive environs that each tributary and each valley possess.
Over one hundred years ago, train travellers disembarked from the trans-continental Canadian Pacific Railway at the present site of the Abbott Ridge trailhead. This is where Glacier House stood. Most tourists came to lunch, and then continue on their way to Montreal or Vancouver. Some stayed over night, and some stayed for several weeks, securing the services of Swiss mountain guides like Edward Feuz and Christian Hasler.
There were no roads or highways in or out of Rogers Pass. It was the exclusive domain and proving ground for a new type of individual. At the turn of the 20th century, making a first accent of a mountain peak was fashionable. So was the study of glaciology and just about anything else that they put their minds to. Those who came here came to discover the "Canadian Alps," on their terms. And all who opened up the vast backcountry did so by foot. It's nice to know, not everything has changed. Today, when hikers push along the trails of Glacier National Park, designated as a wilderness national mountain park, they do it as the generation who discovered Rogers Pass did - by foot.
The remnants of Glacier House are scattered throughout the bushes and trees. Most visible is the old boiler house about 100 m. from the trailhead sign. Hikers leave valley floor and quickly gain elevation to Marion Lake in the sub alpine. I prefer to do Abbott in the morning. Don't let the first 15 minutes discourage you. It's always the toughest. Especially in Rogers Pass where, generally, if your not going up, you're going down. If you're in good shape and acclimatized, a nicely paced 35 - 45 minute hike will get you up to the lake. Others will need more time and require brief stops. That's okay. Go at your own pace, hiking is a marathon not a sprint. Listen to your body and find the pace that allows you to go steadily. There are rest benches along the well-marked trail for water stops. For many people, Marion Lake is the extent of their hike. It's a good picture stop or snack break in the mighty Selkirk Mountains, and it rewards hikers with a great view of Rogers Pass and the Illecillewaet Valley from the lookout. It's only the beginning, however. I don't use a watch the rest of the way.
Leaving Marion Lake, the trail begins its southerly ascent. The size of the Englemann spruce trees diminishes rapidly. The vegetation zones clearly change. A junction half way between Marion lake and the alpine meadow offers two routes to Abbott Ridge. The leisurely lower trail or the newer short cut. We take the short cut, and push up into the higher regions of the park quickly. The summit of Abbott Ridge shows its face to the sun hundreds m. above.
Breaking into the alpine meadow, above the tree line at 2000 m. is truly breathtaking on a summer morning. We live most of our days in dimensions that are a result of human activity. But within this panorama, everything is on a scale much grander. You don't get this one from a book - this is wilderness terrain - glaciers, sky, and a landscape shaped by eons of years, each marking a life, a season, an epoch. The scale is Colossal. From the alpine meadows and past Lake MacNeill (15 m. x 10 m., so named because I liked to photograph it) the trail winds up the final grade to the top of Abbott Ridge. Keep your eyes open for grouse, they may be seen in the summer.
Trail end is a great place to have lunch. 2300 m.+ above sea level and spectacular peaks, ridges and glaciers in every direction as far as the eye can see. For mountaineers, this is where the fun begins. Within reach are Mts. Abbott and Afton, The Rampart, The Dome and Sapphire Col. After lunch, conversation is charged with a sense of awe. You never want to leave once you're on top. There is an indelible awareness of the natural forces at work upon the great stage we strut our stuff. Everything is dynamic, nothing is static. No Y2K problem here, whatever that was.
The sun's slow arc across the landscape to the Pacific describes the diminishing light left in any day, and the time to turn back down. If anything, hiking into the alpine tundra and into the back country of British Columbia's mountain regions is about time in a profoundly different way than it's measured in a downtown Vancouver office at Georgia and Burrard. The migratory departure of the barn swallow in late August has deep significance that no timepiece can convey. It marks a time when the warm summer nights turn chilly and snow is not far off. In Rogers Pass, it is this way, as it has been for eons.
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I am standing in the little meadow at the west entrance of Rogers Pass where sport mountaineering in North America began in the 1880s. Only the sounds of migratory birds, the chirps of the ground squirrels and a distant waterfall on Avalanche Crest punctuate its silence, serenity and sheer beauty. The air is laden with the rich smell of humus in the morning sun. Englemann spruce, western hemlock, alder, tall grasses and thick clusters of devil's club envelope the landscape and underbrush. And through the meadow, a hiking trail winds into the woods and up the Asulkan Valley beneath the glaciated peaks of the mighty Selkirk Mountains.
Moments like this are forever sublime.
Today, it's hard to believe the continent's first mountain chalet, Glacier House, sprawled across this track of land. A truck in the distance, gearing down on the big 90-degree turn, betrays its extraordinary past. This is the site of the first Canadian Pacific Railway hotel over a century ago. Even more difficult to imagine is that Rogers Pass was once the great destination choice for two generations of adventurists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At the turn of the century, when the world thought of Canada, this is the image they saw: mountains, glaciers and a wilderness terrain that vanished from European landscape. And they came.
Ardent alpinists, mountaineers and nature lovers, scientists, photographers and artists - came to hike, study, work, photograph, map and make first accents of mountains they named after themselves. Some even came to relax.
Between 1887 and 1925, Glacier House grew to be an enormous mountain chalet with 90 rooms (present day Glacier Park Lodge has 51), a bowling alley, central heating, hot and cold running water, electricity, wine cellar, horse back outfitters, tally-hos to the Nakimu Caves (Brewsters began here) and Swiss mountain guides to escort clients to the glaciers and peaks. A school at Glacier served the needs of children whose parents worked here.
But in the fall of 1925, the CPR closed her doors for the last time. In 1929, everything of value was taken out of the 'old lady of the Selkirks' and she was gutted. Without ceremony, she burnt to the ground thereby ending the golden era of mountaineering in Rogers Pass.
Today, few artifacts remain of this era. Scattered remnants of the early days and old photographs testify to a time when a brash, youthful generation pushed further than anyone in history to lay the foundation for future hikers, mountaineers and back country skiers.
But, what happened? Why did the CPR walk away? How did a region so rich in alpine heritage seemingly vanish over night? And how does an area, so acclaimed for it’s exceptional hiking, fall into almost total disuse for decades?
This is the story of Rogers Pass then and now, and your guide to discovering the best kept hiking secrets of Glacier National Park, British Columbia, one of Canada's most beautiful wilderness mountain terrains.
"In from the Ocean a new season enters
Suitcases are packed and the buses are full
We're each on a journey, we think of the fire
That was ever so bright and ever so warm."*
For more information on 'THE HIKER'S GUIDE TO ROGERS PASS," contact Derek MacNeill.
*"fOREVER WHEN WE ARE YOUNG," GEOGRAPHY OF THE MIND, C Derek MacNeill 1986
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ONE STEP TO THE FUTURE,
ONE FOOT IN THE PAST
by Derek MacNeill
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It's 5 o'clock in the morning. My red Volkswagen rolls down the Trans-Canada-Highway beneath a veil of stars. Cat Steven's 'Morning Has Broken' is on the radio. It's September. The days are shorter and cooler. A new season is beginning. The lights of a barge push through the heavy mist on the Fraser River, an image seemingly repeated since time immemorial. There is a sense of discovery, a feeling that I should be going to the ice rink for hockey practice. But, this morning is different, at least for me.
At 6 o'clock A.M., I enter a rather Spartan stone chapel located high on a hill over looking the central Fraser Valley. The air is charged with sounds that are as fundamental to western society in the past thousand years as rock-n-roll is to a Friday Night. The sound is Gregorian chant. The year is 1974, and Westminster Abbey in Mission, British Columbia is one of the rare places in Canada a university student can actually hear centuries old sacred plainsong for a music history research paper.
Imagine, said John Lennon. I did, albeit in activities unique to my perspective.
My host, brother Maurus, gives me the grand tour of the abbey and the operations of the largely self-reliant monastery. Monks work the land, and the fields have the appearance of being from the middle ages. Brother Maurus takes delight in showing me the monastery's original art by a talented monk, the chapel, the guest facilities, a library whose books date back several hundred years and the long pathways through the wooded grounds. Perched on a hill overlooking the Fraser Valley, there is an undeniable quality of pastoral serenity quite separate from the secular world from which I had come. I find time for consideration and contemplation. After several visits, I complete my research on Gregorian chant.
Ah, the students life!
The 1970's were heady days for a young undergraduate coming of age. It wasn't the bell-bottomed, disco driven inanity that Hollywood would have us believe, On the contrary, there was a systematic and (I'm showing my bias here) a balanced approach in discovering the world around us. There had to be. Stakes were high: gender and cultural inequities; firecracker racial intolerance; the Vietnam War and a military order that was positioned to deliver by design or error the unthinkable - nuclear war. Yet, a sense of enlightenment was everywhere. There was a sense that a community who had clarity and room for all could reform a stringent, tired system from the grass roots.
Somewhat naive, perhaps, but we were not without hope.
Now, after twenty some years since my first visit to Westminster Abbey, I have an indelible recollection of a community of like-minded people given to a manner of worship that goes back centuries. Particularly to the great age of monasticism, a time of fervent energy and growth. During the 11th and 12th centuries it served in part to revolutionize western civilization into the dynamic entity it is today. If the second millennium A.D. is the millennium dominated by western civilization, it’s grass roots lie here. A century when the corner stones of modern institutions such as banking, the university, the military and commerce are established. It is a dynamic period when communities competed to build the highest towers and construct cathedrals from stone and great, luminous stained glass windows.
The results were astounding! 800 hundred years later, the High Gothic cathedrals of Chartres and Bourges and numerous others in every village and every town through out Europe stand as testaments to this enterprise.
But the monastic movement took another route. Its appeal came about, to a great extent, as a result of young people's reaction to the established order.
Sound familiar?
Brothers and sisters vowed an adherence to simplicity, love, charity, humility, and in some orders, a vow of poverty to achieve spiritual growth. Such was the dynamic behind the Franciscans and Cistercians, two new orders that came about as a reaction to the rich Benedictines of the Cluniac order. If it sounds like the 1960's in the west, the parallels are uncanny. The crusades were launched to establish western orthodox interests. Pan European trade routes increased commerce; technological advancements increased opportunities for wealth; travel and exchange of information. Pilgrimages contributed to the cultural and economic exchanges; and from a grass roots populace the greatest minds of the generation helped re-define the conditions under which the western experience was going to sustain itself.
Heady times, indeed. The 12th century was a time of great change.
Today, I find myself sitting on the upper grounds above my old elementary school contemplating all what has passed in the wash of a spectacular west coast sunset. Like so many things in my life, I haven't taken time to enjoy it often enough. The silhouette of the elementary school evokes a purer, gentler, more impressionistic time. I am reminded what a gift memory is.
Looking across the dusk to Vancouver Island beyond, the usual din of the city is interrupted by the sound of a muscle car bullying its way up the street beside the grounds. Its sound waves rumble and growl. Suddenly, from the open window, the emission of a male voice punctuates what was once the still, pristine air,
"Hey! You! Park's Closed! Go Home!"
I look at the car. I look at the sunset in the silhouette of my old school. My sensibility snaps from that of poet to that of a warrior.
And, I find myself justifying, half aloud, that I am home. This is where I came from, and that there are, in this ever changing world, few guarantees that tomorrow will be as good as yesterday - or even today - unless we make it so.
copyright Derek MacNeill 1999 From Country Living Oct-Nov 1999
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I FIND MYSELF WISHING
Derek MacNeill
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I find myself wishing
The leaves were off all the trees.
Everything would be much easier.
Work that has been done could not be undone.
I wouldn't have to worry about cleaning the yard.
Yet, there is something beautiful about
Illuminant yellows and fiery reds defiant against a dull grey sky.
Like laughter of children in the lane,
Its canvas lasts a day or so
Or until the next cold wind.
I dreamt of you last night. The smell
Of summer-rich ground permeated your body.
Your countenance tasted of dew, its measure
A definitive arc swelling.
All these years,
Your essence holds firm,
lingers, remains like a vow
whispered in the dark, still...
I find myself wishing
The leaves were off all the trees.
November 2000
From "The Nature of Light on Skin," copyright Derek MacNeill 2001
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WHY I SLEEP WELL
Derek MacNeill
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Beethoven’s music
Washes across
Curving earth
On a warm summer evening.
Technology bows amid a laughter of stars.
Full moon throws shadows
Across the yard
Like a child casting a line.
Why shouldn't I smile?
Why shouldn't I sleep well
When selfish darkness
Tries to capture my thoughts?
From "The Nature of Light on Skin," copyright 2001 Derek MacNeill
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THIS IS YOU DRAWING
Derek MacNeill
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O! In quiet of afternoon
You lie beside me, and draw me
Into your world, right and informally ours.
Beyond reach or touch, beyond
Impulse to stop a design that
Spins about itself like a intricate mobile,
Beyond the fleshy mounds
Along the curvature of a back that lends itself
So well to the sweetness of what is your body,
Beyond mouth on skin, sigh-moistened
Breath and respondent dance that defines a quality
In the Deepest nature of our lives.
It is you, and you alone.
Your essence In the skin of our relationship
to which I am drawn to know only, and
Only desire to know.
From "The Nature of Light on Skin, copyright Derek MacNeill 2002
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NOTRE DAME de CHARTRES
Derek MacNeill
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I will be your eyes,
You be my heart.
Rising,
Your wings are open.
Within them you gather us;
We who are fixed and marble-like,
We who are as real as the stone relief
From which you come.
There is a ceiling, there are windows
Stained
With glass through which we transcend,
Incomprehensibly, into sunlit images
Of the makers of your maker.
We are liberated from stone.
You see earth,
Her green, lush country side
Over flowing and abundant
In her rivers and trees,
In her air and expanse.
A wondrous light
Awakens you
To a miracle of design.
Your sword is a bell.
It rings when you unsheathe it,
It rings when you breathe.
It rings now.
Chartres, France, October 10, 1976/2001
From "The Nature of Light on Skin," copyright Derek MacNeill 2002
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CHAOS!
by Derek MacNeill
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Chaos lurks like a panther.
Poised on every shelf!
A bureau door away from littering
A desk, a floor or worse.
It sprawls on sofas. From counter tops
And under sinks, it propagates
Its dominion ever spewing
Dis-order like a curse.
Chaos loves all things fallow.
It clings to things in tree snake fashion,
And smoothers it’s un-vigilant prey
In order to make it its own.
One may regard Chaos
As menial, an unworthy irritant,
But be assured, it’s unsatisfied devouring
The heart of one household alone.
So, listen my dear friend and beware!
Don’t let Chaos near.
It possesses an insatiable want
To eat from the hourglass of all unwitting hosts.
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