Peregrination to Haida Gwaii PART ONE - Calgary to Athabasca Falls

I'm sitting in a hotel room in Prince George, half-watching Olympic high bar gymnastics from Beijing as I type. I'm not much of a gymnastics man, but I'll take whatever CBC will give me (extensive coverage of U.S. and Chinese athletes, apparently) for my first TV viewing of Olympic coverage so far in these games. Nor am I in a place covered by the itinerary of the title of this blog post. I'm writing retroactively. The Athabasca Falls hostel does not have running water, and it certainly does not have wireless, so here I am backtracking so that I can keep with my plan of a-post-a-day during my piligrimage/vacation toward, on, and from Haida Gwaii / the Queen Charlotte Islands.

The story is this: I have 10 days off between our final performance of "Old Growth" in Calgary, and our tech rehearsal in Victoria - so I'm going to go visit the place where our play is set. The island it's set on (Graham Island in the Queen Charlotte archipelago) and the specific site (the site of the formerly vertical, now horizontal, still (they say) deeply moving, Golden Spruce). My plans are to 1) view the Spruce (from across the river - if I actually cross to the far side where the GS lies, I suspect I will be somehow reprimanded), 2) stay at the Golden Spruce motel, and possibly identify which room Grant Hadwin stayed in before he cut down the tree in question, as well as general Haida siteseeing and an incredible ferry daytrip down the famous Inside Passage to the top of Vancouver island. This little 10-day peregrination is costing me near $1,000 - but it's going to be incredible.

So far, so good, with some repeats of things I've previously seen and loved.

Here's the breakdown of Day One (Sunday, August 10):

CALGARY:

This is where I was - for Calgary Fringe. And so, this is where I left from. About an hour and a half later than planned. Poor Laura Harris - the writer and star of the Fringe hit Pitch Blond. Hit where it's played so far (Victoria and Calgary) at least. I was tired - packing my car took far more cognitive power than I had, so I was late picking her up to act as her chauffer, or Greyhound, to Banff.

BANFF:

Laura was going to visit an actor friend there who turns out to the in the same production as *many* friends of mine. Our tour of the Banff Centre buildings produced about 10 people that I know, from some quite different places. We went to the hot springs after lunch and the three of us wore the one-piece, navy, androgynous and vaguely skirted 1920-style swimsuits that you can rent there for a princely $1.90. I rented one back in 2006 when I visited the springs in the month of February (downright surreal) and everyone stared at me like I was some sort of Anachronism Society freak. Even though they could have rented one too. This time, I was in company - and we took pictures!



LAKE LOUISE:

Later in the afternoon, I left Banff with the aim of getting to my hostel sometime before dark. I stopped in at Lake Louise, to wave at the lake and view and overpopulation of tourists for probably about my seventh time. As many times as I've spent full days there hiking the trails to the two teahouses and up to the top of the Beehive (probably three), I've also come just to wave and wash my hands in the cold water and take an obligatory photo of a canoe - or ice castle - in front of the massive stone and ice wall at the back of the valley that makes this one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Usually I would stop at the bakery in Louise's lone (and, really, quite excellent) minimall - and pretend that it's an actual town - but I wanted to get trucking up the Icefields Parkway.

COLUMBIA ICEFIELD:

I've passed this white monster a few times, but this is the first time I walked up to it. I just went up to the foot of the glacier. Several people were walking on it, despite many warnings about instability and crevaces and even an alarming graphic of a small child trapped down a crevace, but I stayed behind the simple rope line. I was wearing my flat-soled Blackspot V2 shoes, after all. (today, the next day, I wised up and wore my serious Raichle hiking boots for the drive/hike). It was windy and sunny and wonderful and a little bit like being on the moon, since the glacier's foot is surrounded by gravel piles that mark where the side- and end-points of the ice used to be. There are also markers showing how quickly this arm of the Columbia Icefield has been receding: 1982, 1976... 1893 was at the Parkway, while the current glacier (in summer, admittedly) is a 15-minute walk from the highway, at least. A rogue path, carefully lined with small boulders, led the way from the main path, in the wrong direction, toward nowhere. Shifting ice indeed. In fact, it led to probably the only place where one can duck out of sight of other glacial explorers, and pee against gravel slopes. There wasn't an outhouse.



ATHABASCA FALLS HOSTEL:

This is about 20 minutes' drive south of Jasper, but not if you come from the south. I'd stayed there before, in 2005 even, and in the winter. It was virtually empty then, but it was hopping now, mostly due to a bus tour of German and English travellers. This hostel has a take-a-book-if-you-want-one policy, but they didn't have what I was looking for: the field guide to Sasquatch (yes!) that was there in 2005. You snooze, you loose. Especially when it comes to Sasquatch.

I've been taking pictures, but it will take a while before I get them off the camera, process and upload...