Before summer’s end, we drove up the Icefields Parkway, called the most beautiful highway in the world. It is spectacular, it’s true, with glaciers flashing overhead all the way. But we were aiming for Jasper, at its northern end.
It could be a journey back in time. Jasper feels like a frontier town, with its long Main Street parallel to the railroad tracks and its false-fronted stores. Equally long trains approach, shunt, and leave, all with a clamour that punctuates conversations in the new al fresco cafes.
Jasper’s streets are mostly named after British royalty: Connaught for the Duke, son of Queen Victoria and one-time Governor General of Canada; Patricia for her granddaughter, a precursor to Meghan and much loved in Canada. Only a few recall the Métis – a mixed people descended from French and Iroquois trappers – who settled here: Miette, Bonhomme, Tonquin. Their community was uprooted when the land was appropriated to create Jasper National Park.
Mid-pandemic, the Jasper Park Lodge is full to its log rafters and missing the 500 students normally hired for summer. Service is benign neglect – you have to make your own bed – or overkill: they take your temperature every time you turn around. But the crowds are here, golfing at its famed Stanley Thompson course. Sitting on the deck with a gin and tonic, I find my thoughts stray to that other famous Thompson. That would be Canada’s extraordinary mapmaker David Thompson, who with his Métis wife Charlotte Small and Iroquois guides mapped the Athabasca Pass across the Rockies in 1811. The trail is 96 miles and hasn’t been much improved, but you could try it. For my part, I am content to look up at it. Jasper is the kind of town where you do this, sit open-mouthed, asking yourself how we got from David to Stanley in only 200 years.
Another epoch, another mindset. I came here as a child with my family and stayed in Beckers’ Bungalows. A highlight was when my sister and I were allowed to go to the dump to watch the bears. I loved the silver flash and roar of the mighty Athabasca river as it rounded the bend. Skiing at Marmot. And being told by my mother once again about Edith Cavell, whose namesake mountain is striped with snow when all else is turquoise water and bright sun. But how did the British nurse shot by Germans get real estate here? There were better names: the massif was called “White Ghost” by indigenous people, “la Montagne de la Grande Traverse” by French traders and “Mount Fitzhugh” by settlers.
Some names stick, however. Smitty’s Pancake house is now owned by Koreans who sell pancakes and waffles before noon and sushi at night. In Our Native Land you can still find gorgeous quill-tufted baskets and stone carvings of musk ox, but the convenience stores sell truly awful imitation dream catchers.
In town the mountain men stalk the streets with their long white stringy hair and tattooed arms. We walk up on the Pyramid bench overlooking the junction and see almost no one for hours. But at dusk the trains draw us down. What is on those always arriving, always departing cars making their laborious transit over the mountains to the ocean and back? Coal, oil, pipes, goods from China; and even a tiny passenger train with a dining car. We go into the station, a small glory of arts and crafts design, and it feels as if every age is here with us.