Wharton’s Icefields

Wharton’s Icefields,
originally uploaded by ocean.flynn.

In a seamless blend of mountaineering, history, botany and fiction, Edmonton author Thomas Wharton revisits the shifting social and cultural events that took place on the edge of the Columbia icefields in the late 19th and early 20th century. In 1898 while on an expedition in the Columbia (Arcturus) glacier, doctor and amateur botanist Edward Bryne fell through a crevasse where he was held upside down in the icy grip of the narrowing walls of the chasm suspended in a liminal state between reality and dreams.

Using Adobe Photoshop I created this digitage inspired by descriptions and interpretations of the angel in Dr. Bryne’s icy vision. I layered images of ice taken at the Glenmore reservoir in Calgary, a Calypso orchid taken on Heart Mountain in June 2008 and my mother’s portrait from the early 1900s.

The Calypso orchid was elegantly selected as a character in the novel, as the origin of its name signifies concealment. It is a fragile plant with a wide, circumpolar distribution, that requires a highly specific ecosystem. Once it was an edible and medicinal plant for the First Nations who gathered plants in the Rockies but with increased traffic on what were once remote montaine trails, it is now an endangered species. At a certain height on Heart Mountain Trail when the scree became too difficult for me to manage, I was looking for an easier route a bit farther back from the steep edge of the trail when I came across a couple of these tiny purple orchids in a delicate floral embrace.

stoney, concealment, edible, circumpolar, ethnobotany, fairy slipper, Venus’s slipper, tagging, taxonomy, walkingtrails, wildflowersnorthamerica, wfgna, rockymountains, rockies, geotagging, geotagged, geotag, creativecommons, calgarydaytrips, alberta, CalypsoFairySlipper, Calypso.Bulbosa,

Citations:

“bare, windswept slope of ice … projecting spine of ice … stepped backward into the abyss . . . (Wharton 1995 [2007:2]) . . . deep blue gloom p.3 . . . “
“I prefer words on a page. They don’t gesticulate.”

“restless crowd with its panoply of cameras (Wharton 1995 [2007:274]).”

Wharton, Thomas. 1995 [2007]. Icefields. Nunatak Fiction. NeWest Press. Edmonton, AB.

Notes

1. The calypso orchid The Calypso bulbosa, Calypso orchid, Fairy’s slipper, Venus’s slipper or Plantae < Magnoliophyta < Liliopsida < Asparagales < Orchidaceae < Epidendroideae < Calypsoeae < Calypso < Salisb. < Calypso bulbosa

Nunatak is a word in Inuktitut meaning “lonely peak,” a rock or mountain rising above ice. During Quaternary glaciation in North America, peaks stood above the ice sheet and so became refuge for plant and animal life. Magnificent nunataks, their bases scoured by glaciers, can be seen along the Highwood Pass in the Alberta Rocky Mountains and on Ellesmere Island. The Nunatak fiction series are especially selected works of fiction by new western authors. Editors for Nunataks for NeWest Press are Aritha van Herk and Ruby Wiebe.

Sexsmith’s expedition is based on the 1859-1860 expedition undertaken by James Carnegie, Earl of Southesk.

Bibliography of research resources acknowledged by auhtor Thomas Wharton

Adassiz, Louis. 1967. Studies on Glaciers. Trans. Albert Carozzi. New York: Hafner.
Carnegie, James. 1875. Saskatchewan and the Rocky Mountains.
Gadd, Benn. 1987. Handbook of the Canadian Rockies, Jasper, Alberta: Corax.
Kagami, Yoshiro. 1951. “Edward Bryne: a Life on Ice.” Journal of Alpine Exploration. ii:6.
Stuffield, Hugh; Collie, J. Norman. 1903. Climbs and Explorations in the Canadian Rockies. London: Longmans, Green and Company.

Uploaded by ocean.flynn on 26 Aug 08, 3.16PM MDT.

em dash

Her people were called the utkuhikhalingmiut or people of soapstone associating a people with the resources in their area. Inuk artist Jessie Oonark’s (c.1906-1983) conversational language like her art work, was difficult for next generations to comprehend because she seemed to talk and think in overlapping circles.

If her stories had been recorded they would probably have needed the em dash, a typographic device to let readers know that the writer-editor-transcriber is breaking the flow of the sentence with a thought within a thought. The reader could choose to ignore the word-thoughts between the em dashes without breaking sentence grammar or structure. The writer-speaker wanted the listener-reader to have more context so the em-dashed thought was added on. What is contained in between—in that liminal space—may well be more consequential that the sentence stripped of context.

The em-dashed content is like an impatient or inconvenient footnote. Perhaps if the storyteller could have mentioned this in the beginning in a different order with more linear structures, the em dash wouldn’t be necessary. But linear stories only work if we all share the same communal memories with common understanding on past events, places and people. Otherwise we have to have these added on thoughts—thoughts inserted into the text—that can make some conversations seem endless and quite difficult to follow.

Notes
1. Character entities for XHTML include em dashes:

mdash 8212 — em dash, U+2014 ISOpub [123]

2. “The m, em space, em quad is “a common unit of measurement in typography. Em is traditionally defined as the width of the uppercase M in the current face and point size. It is more properly defined as simply the current point size. For example, in 12-point type, em is a distance of 12 points. The em dash is a dash the length of an em is used to indicate a break in a sentence.” (Adobe Fonts > Type topics > “A glossary of typographic terms.”).

Seven Valleys: View from Calgary

At dusk, a few days ago, we witnessed the rare visual phenomenon of seven valleys, clearly layered in graduated hues against the prairie sky’s orchestra of colours.

For some months now I have been studying the names, heights and geomorphology of peaks, valleys and ranges visible from the city 125 km to 200 km to the east so I could recognize them by their distinctive features and their relationship to one another: Devil’s Peak, Mount Aylmer, Orient Peak all the way south to Remus and Romulus. We had been seeking out all the higher viewpoints the city provided in parks and mundane parking lots and it seemed at times as though we shared our passion for summits with what may well have been dealers who wanted visibility for different reasons.

Growing up beside ocean waves ceaselessly rising, folding, crashing, merging, blending it has taken months to find words to help me see the mountains more clearly. Like an exercise in seeing, I forced my eyes to focus only on the contour line of distant peaks, to not lower my gaze to the paper so that my pencil traced not what I knew about other mountains but what I could see at that particular moment from that exact space. White patches of snow caught on the peaks and striated edges made winter-viewing more productive for all but the highest summits. Regardless of the season however, I came to realize that the Rockies were like the ocean and the mountains like waves, endlessly appearing and disappearing as the quality of light and air changed.

On that particular evening Google maps 3-D view was no longer virtual. We could clearly see the Trans-Canada like a thin silver thread on the surface of the rolling foothills. We could see Moose Mountain, the most easterly of the range and we could imagine Sibbald plains below. Spray Valley, Sundance Creek . . . We could see Mount Aylmer in the Palliser Range 50 kilometres further west viewed a week ago from Sulphur Mountain gondola. Beyond Mount Aylmer the ocean of peaks stretched into British Columbia …

Sulphur Mountain Gondola Panorama with Placenames Centre

Sulphur Mountain Gondola Panorama with Placenames Centre

Sundance Ridge
Mt. Bourgeau 2931 m
Mt. Brett 2984 m
Pilot Mtn 2941 m
Mt. Temple 3543 m
Mt. Cory 2789 m
Sanson Peak 2337 m (with weather observatory)
Mt. Norquay 2345 m?
Mt. Brewster 2839 m
Cascade Mtn 2998 m

From signage on the top of Sulphur Mountain:
“1. Bow River begins as meltwater from the Wapta Icefield above Bow Lake, 90 km north along the Icefields Parkway.
2. Bow Valley Parkway Hwy 1A is the original route from Banff to Lake Louise.
3. Mount Temple In 1894 American mountaineers from Yale University made the first ascent of this lofty summit, the first Canadian peak over 3353 m to be climbed.
4. Cosmic Ray Platform The former Sulphur Mountain Cosmic Ray Station was one of a network of stations built for the International Geographical Year 1957-1958. The Summit Promenade leads to hands on exhibits.
5. Weather Observatory was built by the Canadian government in 1903. Banff pioneer Norman B. Sanson made over 1000 ascents of Sulphur Mountain to record weather data. The observatory closed when Sanson retired in 1931.
6. Mystic range (chain) including Mount Norquay 10 minutes from Banff one of the first sky centres in North America
7. Fenland Trail. People have come to this spot for 10, 500 years. Long ago they stalked elk and gathered plants. There is now a 2 km self-guiding trail that is easy to stroll.
8. Stoney Squaw one story links the mountain to an old Stoney Indian woman who hunted on the mountain while taking care of her sick husband at its base.
9. Bankhead a mining town in the end of the 19th century where 250, 000 tons of coal (charbon) was mined. It was used to run locomotives. It is now a ghost town.”