Travel Threads: Canada

Our chief destination was usually Algonquin Provincial Park, where we'd canoe the rocky lakes and rivers, fish and harvest wild blueberries, and hike. There were moose and deer, beaver, loons, well-fed chipmunks (oops) and, not so beloved, black flies. We'd joke about the 6 o'clock loon flying up the river with eerie hoots each morning and evening, and we'd listened with held breaths to the tiny mewls and squeaks of baby beavers inside a lodge built right next to our campground. I loved the soft feel of the pine needles underfoot and the rush and flow of the winds in the pines overhead. There are dozens of pictures of me atop various boulders and rocks left over from the last glaciers, whose marks we could still see on the landscape, along with the incredible giant stumps of trees clear-cut in the 1800s.

Most of all, there was the oddly comforting knowledge that a few wolf packs lived inside the park boundaries. One night the rangers gave a talk and took 500 people out to hear them, and I was impressed that so many people could be so conscientiously quiet, standing on a gravel road in the dark. One ranger howled, setting off a loon at our feet. Finally, the puppies answered with a chorus of yips and squeaks across the lake, and eventually the adult wolves joined in. It's an eerie, plaintive, beautiful music that stays in the bones long after the last note has faded.

Before heading for the wilderness, however, we usually stopped for a few days in Toronto, one of my favorite cities. It reminds me a lot of Seattle, not just because of the needle, but because it's a friendly city, and because people there seem to have an appreciation for the outdoors.

We always went to Ontario Place, an amusement park built out on the water with everything from theaters and shows for adults to an incredible water park and 12-and-under playground for the kids. But the highlight of Toronto for us was the Ontario Science Centre, where I got to play with my first drawing tablets and computer graphics in the early eighties -- and many, many other fascinating exhibits that made science interesting and cool.

One summer we headed to the Canadian Rockies instead. Lake Loiuse is unreal, a lake formed from glacial runoff that's a pearly mint green; nearby Moraine Lake is a deep lapis blue. There was great fishing and the best rainbow trout I've ever tasted at Moraine Lake lodge! Anyone who's been to Canada has seen Moraine Lake without knowing it, since it's set in the Valley of Ten Peaks, which adorn the back of their twenty dollar bill (why can't American money be that scenic?)

There are red poppies and wild roses -- Alberta's symbol -- all over the mountainsides, pikas and marmots high up on the slopes, mountain sheep and mule deer, moose and brown bears farther down. We ran into all of them on that trip!

Alberta's a great place for renting horses and riding up into the high mountains.

On the border between Alberta and Montana is the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park: two national parks spanning the American Rockies, established in 1932 to promote peace and multi-national conservation efforts.

As usual, I was choosing patches that reflected what we saw or heard on that trip -- rare mountain sheep and wolves, Waterton Lake and the glaciers themselves.

Going out on Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Icefield was stunning, but what was more amazing is seeing photos of how much it had retreated during the 40 years or so since my father visited. In the last 20 years, what was left has disappeared at an even more incredible rate. (Click thumbnail for dramatic photo of meltwater coming out like a river from toe of glacier-- it wasn't doing that when I was there in late summer in the late 80s.)