Mountain Voices: The Ancient Wall
The Ancient Wall
Written by Eleanor Stephenson
This story comes to us from the book Mountain Voices. Paired with photos from the Mountain Legacy Project, Mountain Voices is a collection of unique short essays from alpinists, activists, artists, and mountain researchers as they share their unique and fascinating perspectives. The ACC is pleased to feature this new monthly series, highlighting a few of the incredible stories from Mountain Voices over the coming year.
To learn more about the book Mountain Voices, or to order a hard copy, visit their website.
August 20, 2011: We’re enjoying gorgeous weather. To our south we can see the aptly named Azure Lake, and to the southeast we’re looking down Blue Creek Valley. Its eastern side is a long, even slope that is currently catching the full afternoon sunshine. On our NTS map it’s called “The Ancient Wall.”
The Ancient Wall was our third photo station that day, thanks to a flight from Alberta Wildfire Entrance Fire Base into the Jasper North Boundary region. Our helicopter pilot took us as close as he could, dropping us off a few feet outside the national park. My field partner and I scrambled along ridges that on foot or horseback would take three days to reach. In all directions, alpine meadows hung between colourful limestone peaks, the only human presence a series of brass survey pins marking the park boundary. Each threatened SEVEN YEARS IMPRISONMENT FOR REMOVAL. I took an imprint in my notebook with the nub of a pencil instead. We followed the pins, consulting copies of H. F. Lambart’s 1927 survey photographs and searching for the exact locations where they were taken.
There’s a certain honesty to alpine fieldwork: part trust and interdependence, part inability to hide. To repeat a photograph, the trick is to line things up, foreground to midground, midground to background. All summer we’d been training our eyes to read the landscape for juxtapositions between angled peaks, distinctive scree fields, and unmistakable notches. Like an old-time rangefinder camera, we realigned ourselves in the landscape until the two images, the old and the new, fell in line.
Of course, the alpine landscape itself changes. Rivers braid new paths through valleys, and landslides cut into slopes. Seasonal snowpack shifts and even shadows trick the eye. Alongside survey pins are more covert signs of human intervention. Glaciers retreat and vegetation patterns change with warming temperatures. Treelines shift. Indigenous Peoples traditionally used fire to maintain grassland travel corridors and hunting grounds. Today, with decades of fire suppression and changing growing conditions, trees have begun to encroach on alpine meadows and valleys like this one. Meanwhile, the limestone that crumbles into our hands reveals fossilized sponges and brachiopods, reminding us that all of this was once sea, the entire Ancient Wall a Triassic seabed thrust skywards. We are among the transitory features here, leaving our own traces in geological time.
But sometimes, you find with elation a particular detail that persists, and with it, the exact place you’re looking for. In this photograph, it is the small jumble of scree in the foreground. These fist-sized rocks, unchanged in nearly a century, told us we were standing in Lambart’s footprints. One of his 1927 photographs shows a thick wool sweater cast aside. I imagine he too must have paused in the warmth of the afternoon sun and looked down the valley with a sense of awe, feeling small in a landscape where it is only natural to feel small. I know that eighty-four years later, we stood in the exact same place and whooped with joy. In our fieldnotes we recorded “a perfect day in the mountains.” And looking through the lens at the rocks in the foreground I wondered, what will persist in a century more?
Mountain Voices
Discover Canada’s mountains as you’ve never seen them before with gorgeous photography from the Mountain Legacy Project accompanied by gripping essays from mountaineers, artists, and mountain researchers.
Mountain Voices features a diverse array of voices, including Indigenous activists, employees of Canada’s national parks, interdisciplinary scientists dedicated to mountains, alpine adventurers, and historians captivated by tales of mountain pasts. Mountain Voices brings the landscape to life through the passion and devotion of those who love it deeply.
“The stories are personal and universal. The paired images are humbling. Together they make a profound case for stewardship of these alpine environments.” -Carine Salvy, Executive Director, The Alpine Club of Canada
Mountain Voices was published with support from The Alpine Club of Canada’s Environment Grant.
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