To the extent Americans think about Alberta at all this sort of scenery and the Calgary Stampede are what probably comes to mind.
By the way this is the Tonquin Valley in Jasper looking west at the Rampart Mountains and into British Columbia. That is Amethyst Lake. It is 24 kilometers from the nearest road. 24 muddy, bug infested kilometers. Not to mention your odds of meeting a Grizzly Bear up close and personal are astonishingly high. One of my all time favorite hikes. But absolutely my favorite back country skiing experience.
There is, of course, a story that goes with the Tonquin Valley, or at least my fascination with it.
My second search and rescue mission happened by accident but ended with me “discovering” the Tonquin.
I was driving along, headed into Jasper from Sunwapta Falls. I’d been kayaking. Not as dangerous as it seems when you look at the picture below.
www.travelalberta.com/…
It was my first day off after 14 days in a row. I should have had my radio off. I get a call asking if anybody can bring a load of fuel to a chopper at Whirlpool Group Campsite.
www.pc.gc.ca/…
Nobody else was anywhere nearby and I was less than 10 minutes from Mile 45 Warden Station where there was fuel and a truck to transport it and maybe half an hour from there to Whirlpool. I radioed my 1020 and explained my plan. They told me it was urgent. I made it round trip in 25 minutes.
They were getting ready to fly a search on the North face of Mount Edith Cavell.
www.pc.gc.ca/…
These climbers had registered to climb that intimidating face you see in the link above. They were experienced, accomplished climbers, and they got a permit. They were now two days late returning and people were getting concerned.
If they had fallen off that face people would have seen their bodies. Anywhere from a hundred to several thousand people visit the Mount Edith Cavell Day Use Site every day during the summer. They stand there staring at that face and Angel Glacier. Dead people would get noticed.
But the protocol is the protocol so Gary the Pilot, and John the Warden assigned were getting ready to fly the face. They figured it would be faster with another set of eyes. That way Gary could fly one way along the face, spin around and fly back the other, slowly climbing up to the top of the mountain.
Now just so you know. I hate helicopters. With good reason, I have been in two crashes. Making things worse, in the mountains flying a helicopter can be tricky because the higher you go the less lift you have and the stronger the winds usually are. I wanted no part of this mission but what can you do?
Needless to say we didn’t find the climbers on the face of Cavell. Nope they were near the top, on the back side of the mountain, lost. What you need to know is that Mount Edith Cavell was glaciated. The ice sheared the front of the mountain clean off, giving all those faces. The back of the mountain is a very high hill, quite rounded.
It is so rounded you can drive a truck up there. There is even a road. Which these guys couldn’t find even though they were less than 200 yards from it. At that altitude there are of course no trees of any height. What you get is wind and ice stunted trees called krumholtz.
sectionhiker.com/...
I got lucky. John was the one who had to get out and give them directions. At that altitude Gary didn’t want to land because he was pretty sure he couldn’t take off again. So he just rested one pontoon on the edge of the mountain while John stepped on the pontoon and onto the mountain. He got to repeat that in reverse once he had given directions.
Needless to say we thought these climbers were morons.
Now as it happens John’s vehicle is in Tete Jaune Cache in B.C. which is where Gary and the Chopper were based.
en.wikipedia.org/…
Tete Jaune Cache is about 100 kms west of Jasper but it usually takes about an hour and a half to drive. It took us just over 20 minutes to fly it. The route goes up the Astoria River and over the Continental Divide and down to Tete Jaune Cache. In other words straight up the Tonquin Valley or as Gary flew it, back and forth across the Tonquin Valley.
He wanted to show me these amazing lakes. They aren’t blue. They are emerald green, and neon pink, and gold. The scenery and the lakes are breath taking. And there is wildlife everywhere including Caribou.
The next day I hiked it for the first time. That was an experience. You don’t realize from the air how much of the trail is a muddy slog or how great the relief is. You go up and down and up and down. Well you get the idea. And viewed from the ground, unless the weather is perfect the lakes all look like muddy versions of what you see from above.
Don’t get me wrong. On a perfect sunny day with no wind it is magical. And there are all these great side trips. I have spent as much as 14 days hiking there. I can’t recommend it enough and if you want to go I suggest you read the link below.
www.pc.gc.ca/…
The first chance I got, which was about a month later, I hiked up Mount Edith Cavell on the easy side of the mountain. On the summit I turned around and tried to locate the road I had spent hours hiking up. It had vanished. Now I knew where it was so eventually I found my way back. I no longer thought the climbers were morons.
I made an Inukshuk to mark the path down.
www.sustainabilitytelevision.com/...
On the hike back down Mt. Edith Cavell I sat down on a rock in a small clearing just below the tree line. Most of the forest was Sub-Alpine Fir. What attracted me to the clearing was that just on the edge, partly hidden under the fir trees were 600 or more of these beautiful flowers. They were what we call fairy slippers here in Alberta. It is properly Calypso bulbosa var. americana. It is a very beautiful orchid.
It was odd to see them growing in sandy soil, much of Jasper is very sandy. Calypso orchids, and this was in 1980, grew mainly in the Boreal forest. Particularly in the forested areas in Muskeg.
I am not really sure how to explain Muskeg to people who have never experienced it. You probably are all familiar with peat or sphagnum moss. You probably know it holds remarkable amounts of water. Sphagnum can hold up to 30 times its weight in water. Now making things even more interesting imagine that moss is floating on top of a lake, and growing out of it is grasses and sedges. In fact, viewed at a distance it looks like a grassland. Appearances are deceptive and young moose often fall through and drown.
Here and there in the Muskeg will be scraggly Spruce trees growing on islands of limestone. And under those trees will be Calypso patches of as much as 1000 or more plants.
The Thompson River Indians, properly known as the Nlaka’pamux use the corms of the Calypso (that is the swollen, underground plant stem that is used for storage) as a food source and the above ground plant as a treatment for Epilepsy (particularly the leaves and flowers).
The Calypso has even worked its way into their stories.
“A chief had many horses, and among them a stallion which his wife often rode. The woman and stallion became enamored of each other and cohabited. The woman grew careless of her household duties and always wanted to look after the horses.
When the people moved camp, and the horses were brought in, it was noticed that the stallion made right for the woman and sniffed about her as stallions do with mares. After this she was watched.
When her husband learned the truth, he shot the stallion. The woman cried and would not go to bed. She stayed up all night trying to poison herself by eating many hundreds of fairy slippers that she had collected to make medicine for her stallion.
At daybreak she was gone, no one knew where. About a year after this it was discovered that she had gone off with some wild horses. One day when the people were traveling over a large open place they saw a band of horses, and the woman among them. She had partly changed into a horse. Her pubic hair had grown so long that it resembled a tail. She also had much hair on her body, and the hair of her head had grown to resemble a horse's mane. Her arms and legs had also changed considerably; but her face was still human, and bore some resemblance to her original self.
The chief sent some young men to chase her. All the wild horses ran away, but she could not run so fast as they, and was run down and lassoed. She was brought into her husband's lodge; and the people watched her for some time, trying to tame her, but she continued to act and whinny like a horse. At last they let her free. The following year they saw her again. She had become almost entirely horse, and had a colt by her side. She had many children afterward.”
The Shaman who told me this story, Mary Manytrees, is long dead now. However there are a number of anthologies of native stories, myths, and legends. In those analogies there are many versions of this tale, suggesting it was around for a long time.
In fact reading aboriginal stories and tales from B.C. and Alberta you realize Calypso features in quite a number of different legends and tales. This is because it is a trickster flower. It doesn’t offer pollinators nectar in return for their efforts.
So bees, the primary pollinator, will visit a Calypso flower and few times when the worker bees are young (or the queen is). But they quickly learn it is a con job. Bumble bees are very fast learners they will visit two or three or at most four flowers and cross Calypso flowers off their life list. Interestingly the distance they fly between Calypsos increases as they visit flowers. The first two might be side by side, there next stop will be 7 flowers away and the last much further than that, usually at least twenty flowers further on. This is probably important to preventing in breeding in these Calypso patches.
Calypso orchids have come up with a couple of really neat tricks to confuse the bees. They will change color and subtly alter their morphology to appear different enough to trick the bees again. And they will grow next to other nectar bearing plants that flower at the same time and attract many bees. Before I get you all excited we have really no idea how they accomplish either of these tricks. But I keep trying to figure it out.
One theory I have, is since Calypso seeds are tiny and can travel large distances on the wind, perhaps they only germinate near plants that legitimately attract and reward pollinators. We know that germination in Calypso is dependent on the presence of certain mycorrhizial soil fungi. And perhaps some flowering plants will only grow in soil rich in these fungi. Purely a theory.
In this case the Calypso was growing next to Arctostaphylos uva-ursi. The natives call it Kinnikinnick (which means smoking mixture) and the common name, and not without reason, is Bearberry.
Native Americans and First Nation Peoples have been smoking Kinnikinnick leaves for millennia. Among other applications it is a vital ingredient in the peace pipe mixture. Kinnikinick was also smoked in any sacred pipe ceremony since it carryied the smoker’s prayers directly to the Great Spirit. It was believed to produce a feeling of calmness and social bonding and my personal experience would tend to support this contention. It is not dissimilar to ingesting MDMA.
The leaves we also made into a tea to treat inflammation of the urinary tract, kidney stones, back sprains and other infections. Native American tribes powdered the leaves and applied them to sores. The berries were made into a tea that was used to ward off obesity and eaten as emergency food. And yes, obesity was a problem before white settlement.
When picking Kinnikinnick berries it is very wise to watch out for bears. Particularly in the spring when it is an important part of their diet. As it happens there were also many, many ants.
They were Formica ants.
To be precise they were Formica podzolica. These are among the shyest of all ants. They are typically found nesting next to trees or large rocks. They are a creature of the Boreal forest.
Kinnikinnick likes sandy soil and direct sunlight which the clearing gave them but it is much more common to see them in Sub-Boreal and Boreal ecozones. I was looking at three species growing together in what should be a less than optimal home and doing very well together.
It is about at this point I began to ask some serious questions. The first was if this was really a good place to eat my lunch? Formica ants not only bite, they also spray Formic Acid. These podzolica ants aren’t aggressive. I wasn’t worried about being bitten, at least not by ants.
My concern was that if there is anything that Grizzly bears like more than Kinnikinnick berries it is a nice mound of Formica ants. And here was a twofer. With a succulent human thrown in for dessert.
If you or I ate more than several handfuls of these ants we would start to have our mouths burn and might will develop oral or esophageal ulcers. Bears are even better garbage omnivores than we humans and they can eat amazingly acid things without any harm befalling them. I do understand why bears like the ants. Chocolate covered deep fried Formica ants is a traditional holiday dish among Han Chinese from rural areas. They are crispy, taste of citrus and are like a really good peanut.
Much as the Grizzly Bear is my spirit animal I got down off the back of Mt. Edith Cavell as fast as I could, ringing my bear bells all the way.
But I remained puzzled about why those plants and ants were living together in a quite hostile Montane environment just below the tree line.
Then something interesting happened. Over the next three decades Calypso orchids almost disappeared from Boreal forests in Alberta. In fact, they are endangered in several US states as well. This is generally perceived as being do to logging and oil and gas exploration, not to mention humans collecting them often for resale. Calypso orchids don’t like to be disturbed.
That said, even where they are not being disrupted by human activity the Calypsos no longer flourish in the Muskeg. The most likely culprit seems to be global warming. In any case, I have watched over decades as Calypso orchid patches have appeared all over the most remote parts of the Tonquin Valley. Every patch I have visited is adjacent to both a large area of Kinnikinnick and one or more nests of Formica podzolica.
There is clearly a story there, I just have no idea what it is.
This is how science works for me. There is no right or wrong way to do science. However, I notice things in the world around me and go from there.
For example, I notice where specific plants grow, where ants and bees and termites live and how they make a living, and how Native Americans use those plants and insects. Just as a matter of curiosity the Dene Tha use ground up podzolica as the base for anti-bacterial cream among other things. Then I try to make sense of what I am seeing. I am trying to create a narrative not unlike the tales Mary Manytrees told. Just with a whole lot more science thrown in.
Friday, May 31, 2019 · 4:39:06 PM +00:00
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Nonlinear
Parks Canada, Lord knows why, built a campground in a major transportation route for Grizzly Bears crossing Jasper National Park. It is called Honeymoon Lake Campground. One night, around 9 as I was wrapping up a campfire talk people came running to tell me my bear trap had trapped a bear. I wasn’t too concerned until they told me before she went in the trap the mother bear had chased her cubs into a tree. Where they still were.
I go and check this out and sure enough there were two cubs most of the way up a pine tree. I had no idea what to do next. So I radioed for help. One of my colleagues, a very skilled climber, came with his climbing gear and two sets of very heavy leather gloves. Peter climbed up the tree grabbed a cub and dropped him. This lead to the cub catching a lower branch and hanging on for dear life. Peter repeated his task and suddenly a 60 pound bear cub was falling 30 feet into my arms.
I am not a complete idiot. I had a blanket ready to catch him. You can not believe how strong a 60 pound cub is and wriggly as all get out. It was worse than wrestling a greased pig. And then I realized I had no idea what to do next. So I stuck the cub in the cab of my truck.
Peter meanwhile was kicking the cub who was now below him trying to get him to climb down the tree. A crowd of over fifty people had gathered to watch this. They weren’t impressed with our bear management skills. Eventually I got that cub wrapped up and in my truck. Now I had 120 pounds of curious, unhappy, incredibly powerful teddy bears (that is what they looked like) in my truck.
We hooked Mommy Bear’s trap up to the truck and Peter drove while I wrestled cubs. It took us over two hours to get to an approved release site. Not because it was that far but because the cubs decided this was all some wonderful game and kept escaping and climbing all over poor Peter.
That was the first time I ever touched a Grizzly Bear.