During our roadtrip to Jasper, I made a quite surprising discovery. Apparently, Canadians don’t care much for traffic rules. They are still very polite drivers and seldom honk or anything like that, and they always stop for pedestrians, but for the more subtle traffic rules there seems to be no respect.

A car can pass you on the right side on a highway, and drivers will frequently drive a lot slower than premitted in the fast lane, so that even if you want to follow the rules, you might eventually be forced to drive past the slower car on the right side in order to get anywhere on time. And all this, even though there are signs saying “Slower traffic keep right” at regular intervals by the road.

Most drivers also drive far above the speed limit and they have huge pickup trucks and city jeeps, which makes the speed even more intimidating. One reason is probably the extremely straight roads here on the Albertan prairie. But still. They don’t stop at stop signs and sometimes don’t even respect traffic lights, especially if there isn’t much traffic.

As a newly hatched driver, fresh from a Swedish driving school, I’m horrified by this unruliness and I’m not sure if I will ever manage to drive here in North America without being terrified every second of the drive.

Mr. P by a mountain lake. He didn’t find Jasper National Park very enjoyable. It was too cold and too wet, the fun to be had was too physically exhausting and he didn’t even get to see a fellow bear. Not at all the place to go for a gentleman with Mr. P’s distinguished taste.

Me, on the other hand, loved it.

Maligne Canyon and a ‘jättegryta’/’hiidenkirnu’. I’m sorry, but I don’t know the right term for it in English, so Swedish and Finnish will have to do.

 Kate has no respect for heights.

 The very unclear view from a vantage point. On the other side of the valley, there supposedly should be beautiful peaks.

 Mule deer by the side of the road. They weren’t even slightly interested in the five giggling girls in the rental car.

 Then, finally, the snowing stopped and we got a glimpse of the majestic Rocky Mountains.

 When we reached the plains, it was pretty much just driving fast on the extremely straight highway. Not very inspiring scenery, to be honest.

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.

At the hostel in Jasper, while cooking the lentil soup, I started talking a little with a Canadian guy who was frying vegetables on the stove next to mine. He asked how I had liked the slopes, and I said that they had been wonderful.

Later, just before I went to brush my teeth, I ran into him by the front door, “There she is!”, and when he asked how I was doing, I said that I was about to crash, still being jetlaged and all. He said “Too bad”, because they were going to light a fire outside in the snow and crack some beers.

The next morning I woke before the others and went out to the common room to read while waiting for them to wake up. There, the Canadian guy was already boiling eggs and when he saw me coming, with my hair on end and my eyes still puffy from sleep, he said, with a smile: “Good morning, honey”.

Ah, these North Americans and their generous use of pet names. I can’t help loving it. Being called ‘honey’ suits me just fine.

(And I’m feeling it. I’ve turned on the backpacker mode. I talk freely with strangers, I ask questions and make jokes and it feels completely natural. At home, I would never behave like that. I’m a shy person by nature. But apparently not when I’m abroad.)

After a day in the slopes, one would think that a relaxed evening by the hostel commonroom fire would be the perfect way to prepare for sleep – but no. With free wi-fi, Facebook calls like a jealous lover and the others spent their evening in the girls dorm, drawing, knitting and surfing the internet. Me, on the other hand, felt like I’d been up til five in the morning (which it was, in European mean time), so I went to bed early and slept like a log until seven the next morning.

As a part time vegetarian, my diet consists of a lot of beans and lentils. I have a signature lentil soup that I used to make and put in neat portions in the freezer, just to take with me as lunch to the university. I ate it so often that Elin even asked for the recipe and made it a few times herself. So when we started discussing food on the drive from Edmonton to Jasper, I thought I could introduce some veggie cooking to the girls. I should have known better.

During the excursion part of the Namibia field trip in 2010 (a part of the third term of the geography programme), we divided ourselves into cooking teams for the making of dinner. On the night that we spent on the camping ground by Fish River Canyon, a group of girls were cooking lentil soup. They started cooking sometime around six and we were expecting dinner at seven or so – but the lentils just wouldn’t cook. It got darker and all the geography students got hungrier and tireder, but the lentils just wouldn’t become soft. Finally, at ten, the girls decided to give up and started serving. The soup was delicious (maybe partly due to the excellent spice of hunger) but still a little al dente.

That little dinner incident should have taught me that Swedish lentils are special, fast to cook and easy to serve. But no, I had to go and do the same mistake myself.

Firstly, they didn’t have red lentils at the superstore, only green. Right there I should have turned away and tried to come up with something else to eat. But we were so tired and just wanted to get going, so I bought the lentils and thougt that I’ll just have to cook them a little bit longer.

Secondly, one shouldn’t plan to cook someting that takes long to make after a day in the slopes, because that is just building up to a disaster. I was dropped off by the hostel and started cooking the lentils while the others went to return our skis and snowboards, and still they had time to take a shower and sit with their computers in the commonroom answering e-mails that they hadn’t had time for during the week, before I even could add the potatoes and carrots and onions to the soup. I saw other hostel guests start making their dinner, eating it and wash their dishes, while my lentils just kept on boiling.

When I finally decided that the soup was done, it had turned a brownish color and really, looked like something that could have been served in a Swedish school kitchen. Not at all tasty, that is. To eat, it was okay though, and the others complimented my cooking – but I’m quite certain that I won’t be known as the master chef among Frida’s Canadian friends. I’ll have to show off some of my other talents, just to make a positive impression. Maybe I could knit them all socks?

 Yea-na in her cool snowboarding goggles, smiling at Frida, Kate and Marit.

 The Scandinavian girls – Marit and Frida in pretty blue, ready to conquer the slopes at Marmot Basin.

 Me, ready to go and looking goofy in my riding jacket, rain pants and the turquoise sunglasses. And really, the outfit worked, despite the snowing and the wind. I bet they didn’t expect that, my dear turquoise sunglasses, when I bought them on the street at the June festival in La Paz, Bolivia – that they would be used as snow protection in the Canadian Rockies, aswell as sun protection in the Bolivian Andes.

 When the snow finally stopped falling, the view was breathtaking.

Saturday was our skiing day. We woke up to a drizzling slowfall, and as the day progressed, the snow never really stopped falling, it only took slight brakes to catch its breath.

At Marmot Basin, they only have six lifts, which I thought sounded really little, but once you got to the top of the mountain, there were so many slopes to choose from that we wouldn’t’ve had gone down the same slope twice if we didn’t want to. The snowing made it hard to see, sometimes, but with my Bolivian sunglasses I did just fine. And since the temperature never got below zero, not atleast down at the base station, my makeshift skiing clothes never presented any trouble either. My riding jacket and rain pants, with the fleece and longjohns underneath, were more than enough. That I looked like a real amateur didn’t matter – fashion has never been my strong suit anyway.

I had forgotten how fun it is to ski. Between the ages of nine and fifteen I went skiing with my dad for a week or so every year, but if my memory serves me correctly, the last time I went skiing after that was the first year of high school, when our whole year went to a place called Romme Alpin for a day. I was seventeen then. What I remember from that trip is winning a race against two guys in my class who supposedly were quite good skiers. That doesn’t mean that I’m any good, I only like going recklessly fast. And that was something that I did this my one day of skiing in the Canadian Rockies aswell.

The black slopes were kind of tricky, especially up at the top, due to the abundance of snow combined with all the not very skilled snowboarders. By noon, the slopes were full of snow heaps that one had to maneuver around in order not to get stuck. Those slopes needed more tecnique and didn’t allow that much speed. But with only two hours left before the lifts would close, we found this section of a very mixed slope that was just perfect, not too snowy, kind of hidden and in one particular part really steep. And before the steep part, there was this kind of edge that, if you approached it with enough speed, would give you a natural jump before landing in the beginning of the really steep section.

Oh, how I enjoyed that particular slope. I just ran straight down, only turning a little so that I wouldn’t lose control completely. I had been skiing with Frida and Marit all day, but now I couldn’t control myself anymore, I wanted the speed and the adrenaline – and as the more mature, not as reckless skiers that they are, Frida and Marit couldn’t keep up with me. So the last hour of my day of skiing in the Rockies, I spent going up a lift called Eagle Express and down a slope called the Dromedary, getting the feeling of weightlessness every time I reached the steepest part. It was not as good as the perfect jump over a high fence with a good horse, but almost. It’s the tingling in the pit of my stomach, the same feeling that I got while biking down the world’s deadliest road in Bolivia. It’s the rush of life, the kind of high that lasts so much longer than anything artificially created.

But the slope ended too quickly and the lifts eventually closed and by quater past four I had found my way back to the car. And the minute I sat down, I felt just how tired I was, just how much I had asked of my muscles that day and that they now required rest in return. I was utterly content and happy.

But now that I’ve been reminded, I won’t allow myself to forget the thrill of skiing. I will not let seven years pass before I put on a pair of skis again. I will need company in the slopes next winter. Just putting it out there. You have almost a year to decide if you dare to race me in the Swedish mountain range when the snow returns.

There’s no point in being lazy. At three, Friday afternoon, Frida and I met up with three of her friends and took the metro to the car rental office. When all bags and humans were packed snugly into the car, we started driving westward. We were headed for Jasper National Park.

The roads in Alberta are so straight, it’s almost scary. The landscape is so flat that you kind of lose perspective. We listened to the radio and sang along and saw the sun going down over the prairie. Our little roadtrip party consisted of Frida and me, obviously, Marit from Norway and Kate and Yea-na from Korea. A nice, cheery croud in the beginning of the drive, but as our surroundings got darker and the radio stations started to disappear until the only ones with a signal strong enough to hear were the country stations, the others started to doze off. The last hour, I think that Frida and I were the only ones still awake – Frida driving and me trying to come up with interesting things to talk about. We got to the hostel just before the check-in deadline and all of us crashed in the girl’s dormitory. We barely had time to make our beds.