Oh, Canada
I grew up a mere 3.5 hours’ drive from the Canadian border, 5 hours from Montréal. I have relatives in Nova Scotia, and my mother’s family used to vacation there in the summers. Yet despite easy access and personal connection to the land of maple syrup, I had never made it up to Canada, unless you count the time I went as a 9-month-old baby, which I don’t. Non-sequitur: my mother loves to tell the story that on that flight to PEI, I was such a well-behaved baby that a woman asked if she could buy me for $50k for her daughter, who was having trouble conceiving. I find it hard to believe that someone could do something so sociopathic as to offer to buy someone’s kid, but my mother insists it’s true. Anyway…
Lee and I took our first jaunt up to Canada at the tail end of June. Our plan was to spend the bulk of July in BC, famed for its soaring mountains that plunge into the sea, networks of sleepy island towns, and legendary hiking/mountain bike trails. Our first stop was Whistler, which we drove up to via the aptly-named Sea to Sky Highway from Vancouver. The drive was one of the most beautiful we’ve ever done; pictures don’t do it justice. Massive, steep mountains faced islands that were taller than they were wide, with each turn in the road bringing more epic landscape into view. The evening fog was rolling in, obscuring the peaks and adding to the grandiosity of the scene. Lee and I both sat slack-jawed in the car, leaning forward with our necks craned upward to try to take in the full scene.
That’s about where the wonder of BC ended, at least for a while. We arrived to our campsite, opened the door, and were immediately overtaken by a cloud of mosquitos. We hurriedly set up camp and hunkered down inside for the rest of the evening, hoping that our proximity to a river explained the bugginess. Unfortunately, it did not, and we spent the better part of the next week pent up inside to escape the rain and mosquitos. Beyond their abundance, Canadian mosquitos are prodigious in their blood-sucking abilities; they were able to penetrate my thick fleece, and my leggings might as well have been absent entirely. I tried going on a short hike one afternoon, covered head-to-toe in the loosest, thickest clothing I could wear and a net over my hat to protect my head, and I still came back with dozens of bites. Without exaggeration, hundreds of mosquitos would cling to our window screens; if you looked at an angle, you could see their probes inserted through the mesh, trying desperately to reach us. The only reprieve was at the Whistler resort, where I assume they spray as it was conspicuously bug-free, but spending $130/day on lift tickets to enjoy the bike park wasn’t a viable option for an entire month. It was with heavy but resigned hearts that we decided to venture back to the US for July, our tails between our legs.
While I spent August visiting with family and friends in New England and Minnesota, Lee gave BC another go, and his experience could not have been more different than our first one. The rainy weather made way for warm, sunny, dry days, and the mosquitos were present but ignorable. His photos of gorgeous mountaintop views filled me with envy and homesickness, so we planned for me to meet back up with him in Revelstoke to try to take advantage of the last dregs of Canadian summer before we had to head back down to WA for our friends’ wedding and begin our migration south to outrun the cold. But now a new foe now threatened our plans: wildfires.
Just as wildfires have worsened in recent years in the American west, so too have they in Canada. Canada benefits from a fairly wet climate near the coast and cooler summer temperatures, but as you head inland, the climate becomes hotter and drier. As we drove into Revelstoke after my flight, the air was thick with smoke, and we could feel it irritating our eyes and throats. Dozens of fires were burning within 100 miles of us, so we decided to gamble and head east, towards Glacier National Park (the one in Canada, not Montana), in the hopes that the wind didn’t change. Our luck held out, and we had 4.5 perfect days of hiking in Glacier, Banff, Yoho, and Jasper National Parks (the .5 is for Jasper, which was starting to get smoky the day after we arrived, cutting our stay short and interrupting our hike).
The United States is renowned for its national parks and natural beauty, and for good reason. But with the exception of Banff, I rarely hear people talk about Canada’s national parks. Here’s a tip: visit!!! Each hike we went on was truly prettier than the last; we’d say “this is the prettiest view I’ve ever seen,” only to turn a corner and throw our hands up in exasperation because, no, actually, this was the prettiest view we’d ever seen. As Lee said on repeat for a week, “Yosemite, Schmosemite.”
The weather was perfect; the temperature hovered around the high 60s (that’s ~20 degrees C, for the Canadians) and a smattering of clouds created beautiful shadow patterns on the mountainsides. Signs of avalanches were everywhere: wide paths of downed trees, moraines, logs heaped at the mouths of rivers. Despite the arid summers, glaciers feed waterfalls, streams, and rivers year-round, so the landscape looks and feels more lush than similar climates farther south. Silt deposited by glacier melt clouds lakes and streams, turning them into a milky, opaque, bright aqua. Even the one night when the smoke caught up to us felt serendipitous, as it created a hazy, glowing sunset that illuminated the mountains and valleys our campsite overlooked. The trails themselves were a fun challenge, providing varied terrain to stave off boredom and a dizzying array of views to stave off fatigue.
After late-season snowpack and cold thwarted nearly all of our May and June plans, after mosquitos, rain, car appointments, and particularly bad ear symptoms for Lee thwarted July, and after being apart thwarted our ability to enjoy August together, we were overjoyed to finally have a spell of good luck. The smoke did eventually push us out of the Rockies and back west, where we tucked in to the Olympic Peninsula for a quiet few days before heading to our dear friends’ wedding in Ranier National Park. This marked the end of our very long stint in the PNW, and now it’s a race against the weather as we try to maximize Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah before the cold weather chases us out.
