Sunday, we went sight seeing a little, before starting our return trip to Edmonton. It was still snowing, so the places where we otherwise would have seen the forest and the valley below and mountains beyond, we only saw a greyish mist.
We did visit a canyon, though. Maligne Canyon, about a twenty minute drive from Jasper town, is an interesting site, atleast for a geography nerd as myself. At the most impressive bridge crossing, the canyon is only about four meters wide, but a breathtaking fifty meters deep. At the bottom, there’s a small stream. It was frozen now, but even when it floods with melt water, it’s hard to imagine how it could dig such a deep crack into the solid rock. And the rock itself must be really special, porous enough to allow the water to dig its channel, but still hard and durable enough not to allow too much erosion on the channel edges. The rock looked sedimentary, or maybe slightly metamorphic, which fits the natural history of the Rockies too. Old sea floor pushed together to form a mountain range.
The site was beautiful, really, and I would have enjoyed walking around there, speculating and being just generally geonerdy with my geography friends. But as the engineering and journalism students that my fellow sight seers were, they met my talk about rock quality and weathering with blank faces. Oh, how I missed Elin right about then.
Maligne Canyon was pretty. Nothing compared to Fish River Canyon (the world’s second largest) in Namibia or what I imagine Grand Canyon (the world’s largest) will be like when I go there in July, but still. Pretty. Hidden among the spruce and the pine.
On the way out of the park, we saw squirrels and mule deer. And then, when we reached slightly lower elevations, the snow stopped falling and we could finally see the snow covered peaks that we were leaving behind. It was beautiful. Not as dramatic as in the Andes, slightly more intimidating than in the Alps, a kind of understated force that was softened by the dark green of the conifers at the mountain’s feet. I must say that the hour between the lifting of the snow fog and the final victory of the prairie was one of the most beautiful car rides that I’ve ever had.
Katja Malmborg 