Kluane Lake (1949, oil on canvas). Collection of the Glenbow Museum.

Photo: Kathleen Lake in Kluane (‘klu-ah-nee’) National Park 

Photo: Mt. Robson, Jasper National Park. The highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, about a 1000 miles away, shares the pyramid form of the mountains of Kluane. 

 

My grandfather’s trip on the Alaska Highway began in Whitehorse, Yukon in October, 1943. From the “Wilderness City,” he and fellow artist A.Y. Jackson travelled northwest towards Alaska as far as Kluane Lake before returning to Whitehorse and then heading southeast to Dawson Creek, B.C. where I began my travel on the Alaska Highway a few weeks ago.

 

Canada’s Yukon territory is larger than California in land area yet is home to just 30,000 year-round residents. Most live in Whitehorse in an arid region whose rounded mountain tops ringed with sparse boreal forests of conifers and quaking aspen reminded me of the high mountain country in parts of Idaho and the four corners area of the U.S. Southwest.

In a land of long days, I kept coming back to the light in thinking about how H.G. and my experience would have differed. In late October, the sun would already have been low in the sky and the light subdued and diffuse. Freezing temperatures would already have set in, evenings spent indoors.

 

I enjoyed cool nights and highs in the mid-to-upper 70s. Like the best days of summer in Seattle, only longer. The sun seemed ever-present and intense, setting in a deeply-satisfying slow-motion.

 

With a long, sweet breeze

Cooling worries of the day

Yukon dusk descends

Photo: Early dusk from Boreale Mountain Biking

 

Dumbarton Rock (1949, oil on canvas). Family Collection. Painted when Hilda and H.G. were on a trip back to England and visiting Scotland. 

 

H.G. was highly-attuned to light and developed a talent for rendering light reflected in water, “as if he understood how the human eye treats it,” observed my friend Mark Perotti after seeing Dumbarton Rock (above). The effect emanates from the lake to the surrounding plain, forest and hills and even back up to the sun-soaked sky.

 

I lingered in Whitehorse for more than a week, spending five nights at Boreale Mountain Biking, a cycling retreat which offers expert guided trail rides and yurt accommodations overlooking Whitehorse and the Yukon RIver valley. I wanted a break from tent camping. I got it, and much more. Boreale’s rustic solitude, indoor amenities and welcoming vibe made it a restful and energizing oasis. The local mountain biking is inspired. Trails radiate from Whitehorse in a feast of scenic singletrack, fun root and rock hops, challenging climbs and fast, flowing descents.

Yukon River Trail

 

H.G. made hundreds of sketches on his three-week Alaska Highway trip from which he produced about 30 finished works (check some more of them out here). In coverage of the resulting exhibition, Calgary Albertan reporter Geneva Lent wrote “it is a NEW country which Mr. Glyde is privileged to see for the first time with the eyes of an experienced artist. He sees it full of life and color, of historical significance, vast wild beauty. He sees it as an explorer.”

Construction Camp, Whitehorse (1943, oil on board). Private Collection, Calgary, Alberta.

 

Old River Boat, Yukon River (1943, oil on board). Private Collection, Calgary, Alberta. 

 

Historic photo: Making Survey Poles (1942, digital print on paper). William E. Griggs. 

 

Historic photo: Construction Equipment (1942, digital print on paper). U.S. Army National Archives, photographer unknown. 

 

H.G.’s interest in human relationships to the land comes through dramatically in his portrayals of highway construction crews who labored long hours in harsh and dangerous working conditions. Notably, many of the U.S. military personnel were african american, who in WW II were barred from most combat service. Most of them were from the American South and suffered particularly brutal adjustments to the sub-arctic conditions. Photographer William Griggs documented construction of the road and the experience of the all-black 97th Engineers Battalion.

I was fortunate to get a unique glimpse into Yukon’s famous past. On a group mountain bike ride guided by Slyvain and Marsha, owners of Boreale, I met several french-canadian filmmakers who were shooting a re-creation of the Klondike gold rush.

 

Many early gold rushers died or were stranded in Dawson City. They were ill-equipped to make it through the winter, or ran out of food, or both. The RCMP began requiring each traveller bring with them all the gear and food to last an entire year. The kit officially had to weigh a ton - 2200 pounds. The goldrushers would arrive by boat in Skagway, Alaska and haul their kit on their backs 25 miles across Chilkoot Pass to Bennett Lake, B.C., making the return hike as many as 50 times. The modern-day adventurers were each required to pack 500 pounds, which took them a mere 14 trips across the pass. They were true to the original pioneers in using only tools, materials and clothing available in the 1890s.

 

On the banks of Bennett Lake, they built rafts out of logs and rope, and rowed and sailed 100 miles across the deep, windwhipped waters of Bennett, Tagish and Marsh lakes to the Yukon River. They completed their epic journey with a 300 mile run down the river to Dawson City.

 

Each of the film crew bristled in their own way when asked about hiking Chilkoot Pass, yet also had settled on a shared description. “You see the same tree, the same rock, again and again” they would say in conjuring the feeling of being on a treadmill, progress stuck in time as the body and mind labored on across weather-beaten, at times vertical terrain. Read more about the trip from first-hand blogger ’yonderlustin.’

Pics from mountains surrounding Bennett and Tagish Lakes and a couple from Whitehorse

 

From Whitehorse I continued on to Haines Junction, Yukon for a visit to Kluane National Park and then south towards home. A large wildfire was still burning in B.C. on Highway 37 just south of the Yukon border. I had wanted to drive home via the Cassiar Highway in northwest B.C., known for outstanding wildlife viewing.

 

I opted instead for a ferry route home through Southeast Alaska to avoid the fire and a road block. Travel through the fire zone had for more than a week been limited to piloted one-way shuttles across a long stretch of smoke and ashphalt, running for just a few hours each day and cancelled at any time if the fire blew up.

Haines Junction (lower right corner)

 

From Haines, Alaska, 150 miles south of Haines Junction, I took a short ferry to Juneau and then a 32-hour ferry to Prince Rupert, where I picked up the road once again. I tookl my time getting back back to Seattle stopping to mountain bike ride in Smithers, Burns Lake and Willams Lake, B.C.

 

Northern B.C. (1944, watercolor on paper). University of Alberta Collection.

Stream, Alaska Highway, Northern BC (1944, oil on canvas). University of Alberta Collection.

 

I arrived a few days ago in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, the first town of any size since passing through Prince George, B.C., more than 1300 miles in my rear-view mirror. The most remote part of the journey, through Northern B.C., is behind me. In the heart of B.C.’s Northern Rockies region is the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area, a 15 million-acre wilderness protected from most new development.

 

A global treasure of biodiversity, the area’s boreal forest, alpine tundra, and stony peaks are home to virtually all the large and toothy animals found in North America - grizzly and black bear, wolf, wolverine, cougar, elk, moose, mountain sheep and goats, and some very rare creatures like Wood Bison, and Woodland Caribou. I was fortunate to get up close to some of them.

Now that I’ve seen the country for myself I understand why my grandfather’s rendering of the beauty of Northern B.C (above) has a sense of foreboding to it. The remoteness of the place, and variable weather that can include snow every month of the year, gives the country a harsh edge, embodied by the jagged, and at first-glance barren, dolomite peaks of the mountains. When H.G. travelled through here in November of 1943 it would have been even wilder and more remote than it is today and winter would already have arrived.

 

I can also see why the people who have made this place home can be fierce in their sense of place. Although unforgiving, the land is also generous - rivers, lakes and mountains teeming with fish and game, pure air and water, and stunning scenery. I stopped at Tetsa River Outfitters, one of several tiny outposts of civilization between Fort Nelson and Watson Lake, to top off my tank. I was serious about topping-off at every opportunity after nearly running out of gas the day before coming into Fort Nelson. I struck up a conversation with the woman running the place. She said, “you either love the North or you hate the North. . . or you love someone who loves the North.” I didn’t ask her which she is.

 

At Tetsa River I paid $1.56/liter (normally about $1.10/liter), or about $6/gallon. As a lifelong conservationist I took a certain smug satisfaction in paying that much for gas. Now we’re talking energy prices that could spark a much-needed evolution in how energy is used and valued in the U.S. My next stop, at Muncho Lake, I paid $1.79/liter, or more than $7/gallon. This time my satisfaction is marred by a twinge of feeling ripped-off. 

 

My last night before pushing on to Whitehorse I spent at Liard Hot Springs, a bonafide must-stop, where the Rockies end abruptly on the southern bank of the Liard River and give way to rolling hills of boreal forest topped by alpine tundra, which starts at about 3000 ft. elevation. The lower pool of the hots prings is a paradise and a work of art. The front of the pool and source of the heat is almost scalding. The temperature fades in intensity as you move towards the opposite end of the pool past a waterfall to the cool waters of an incoming stream.

 

I lingered late and walked back to camp along the quarter-mile boardwalk in twilight. I had forgotten my bear spray and with the hot springs' reputation for bear activity, bruin-shaped shadows seemed to leap from everywhere out of the surrounding forest. Ivan E. Coyote's story about the be-heading of a woman by a grizzly near the upper pool a few years ago didn't help.

I had met the story-teller and writer earlier in the evening. She was born and raised in the Yukon. A Yukoner (pronounced ‘you-conner’ where ‘conner’ sounds like the Irish name ‘Coner’). She has just released a new CD of stories about her life and family. She gave me a copy which I listened to promptly the next morning on my way to Whitehorse.

 

Her stories are scored to songs she wrote, performed by professional singers, including one by well-known Yukon country/folk artist Kim Beggs. Ivan's stories and delivery are soulful, authentic, and conjure vivid images of the northland and it’s people. Art. At a time when I was starting to feel like a stranger in a strange land, my evening spent hanging out with Ivan grounded me in place and steeled my resolve to keep heading north. 

 

In case you were wondering. Yes. The bugs up here are ferocious at times. The stretch of road between Fort St. John and Fort Nelson was a four-hour spasm of multi-hued, gooey bug gore pasting my windshield, front of my car, and roof-mounted mountain bike. The good news is live bugs are steadily eating their way through the arthropod hors d’oeuvres and my car is actually visibly cleaner with each passing day. 

 

In leaving the Rockies behind for good, I’ll leave you with a rocky mountain wildlflower bouquet:

 

Edmonton (1943, oil on board). Collection of the Edmonton Art Gallery.

 

I arrived yesterday in Fort Nelson, B.C. at mile 283 of the Alaska Highway. The highway stretches from Dawson Creek, B.C. (mile 0) to Delta, Alaska (mile 1422). The road was built in less than eight months in 1943. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the U.S. into World War II, the U.S. military made construction of an overland route connecting Alaska to the Lower 48 states a top strategic priority.

 

My grandfather and fellow artist A.Y. Jackson, a founding member of the Group of Seven Canadian landscape painters, were commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada to document construction of the highway through their sketches and paintings. They spent three weeks traveling with construction crews in October/November, 1943. Edmonton, a few hundred miles to the south and east of Dawson Creek was a key staging area for the U.S. Army, responsible for building the road.

 

Pulling into Fort Nelson yesterday, I was struck by how small a town it is for such a large point on my map of northern B.C.  The town sits on the western edge of Canada’s great boreal forest, with the foothills of the Rockies visible to the West. The country here is big and wild. I drove for fifty and sixty mile stretches seeing no evidence of humanity at all except for the highway itself. The long vistas make the hills deceptive. What look like rolling climbs are actually steep pitches, forcing my car’s transmission to downshift, the engine laboring. 

 

I may not be posting again for a while. I’ll be spending a few days camped in the Muncho Lake area in the mountains between Fort Nelson and Watson Lake, the next place I’ll be with internet access.

Peace River region between Prince George and Dawson Creek, B.C.

Alaska Highway between Dawson Creek and Fort Nelson.

Unnamed mountain landscape (oil on board). Family Collection.

 Jasper National Park is home to the Columbia Icefields, a remarkable grouping of glaciers that mark the birth waters of three major rivers, which diverge dramatically to three corners of the compass. The North Saskatchewan flows east to Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba. The Columbia empties far south into the Pacific Ocean near Portland, Oregon. And the waters of the Athabasca race north to the Arctic Ocean via Great Slave Lake and the MacKenzie River, Canada’s longest.

Athabasca Glacier, Columbia Icefields

On my way to explore the icefields I crossed the North Saskatchewan, already flowing strong and swift a score or so miles south of its glacial head. At Saskatchewan Crossing the river makes a sweeping turn to the east. The tight valley suddenly opens up and the mountains back away. I could sense there was something special about the place. I stopped to look down on a broad flood plain where the river widened from tens of feet to many hundreds in more than a dozen braids. Rivers are the arteries and veins of the land, bringing water to parched places, nutrients to starving soils, and food to hungry creatures. Where they braid to form wetlands, rivers give generously, their coursing rivulets like capillaries suffusing a vital organ with life.

Saskatchewan Crossing, North Saskatchewan River

I learned that Saskatchewan Crossing was a layover spot for the Piikani tribe of Canada’s First Nations in their ancestral migrations from the eastern slopes of the Rockies, across Howse Pass, to the upper reaches of the Columbia, where I imagine they went in part to feast on salmon when it was in season. The east/west migrations of the Piikani would have mirrored the movements of tribes in  Montana and Idaho who travelled between the rich buffalo hunting grounds of the high plains to the salmon bonanza on the Snake and the Columbia River, born of the same icefields as the Saskatchewan.

 

Later, explorers and fur traders also crossed the continental divide at Howse Pass, much like Lewis and Clark crossed Lolo pass to reach the Columbia River from the Upper Missouri. British-born Canadian David Thompson, who has been called the “greatest land geographer who ever lived” for mapping nearly four million square miles of North America, spent many days at Saskatchewan Crossing waiting out bad weather to get across the pass.

 

I think my grandfather would have appreciated this place, whose natural history and human antiquity is as expansive as the landscape. He might have seen potential here for an epic work of storytelling, fusing the landscape - beautiful, generous and harsh - with the people whose lives were inextricably a part of it. Here’s an example of one of his epics:

 

Alberta History (1951, casein, dammar, varnish). University of Alberta Collection. This mural, some 15 feet long and 8 feet tall, took my grandfather and several of his students four months to complete. H.G. donated the mural to the university where it hangs in the Rutherford Library in Edmonton.

 

Here are some more photos from my visit to Jasper National Park:

 

Three Sisters (watercolor, 1943) Family collection. Mountain range flanking the town of Canmore, Alberta.

 

Monday, July 12th (Fernie, BC)

 

Rain, hail, lighting and thunder in Fernie this afternoon. Better day for blogging than biking. I arrived in the laid-back rocky mountain recreation town yesterday, made camp and settled in for two to three days of mountain biking, hiking and time off the road.

 

The locals are outgoing and unguarded, calling to mind a quality of Canadians my british grandparents found so disarming when they arrived in Calgary, which would have had a small-town feel in 1935. My aunt, Helen Collinson, wrote “my parents arrived without the slightest understanding of the bold friendliness, the lack of reticence, the openness, the guilelessness, and the curiosity that they encountered.”

 

Looking at the mountains around town I can plainly see what my grandfather meant when he said of the Rockies, “I was back to painting architecture,” comparing the structure of the mountains to the spired churches and elegant buildings he painted in England.

 

Last evening I sat through a massive thunderstorm, which unleashed rain so hard that my MSR Vista Wing, a seven-point wonder of a camp shelter, did a pretty fair imitation of the surrounding mountain ranges, shedding water in thick, snaking rivulets. I stayed dry and enjoyed a power of nature I almost never get to witness in Seattle.

 

Saturday, July 10th (Osoyoos to Moyie, BC)

 

I started the day driving across the dry Okanagan plateau, the air crisp in the morning sun. My grandfather might have stopped to sketch or paint the gently rolling farmlands, still verdant from this year’s long-lived spring. I think he would have found the palette of greens and rhythms of this homestead especially appealing:

 

At the working town of Trail, I crossed a free-flowing stretch of the mighty Columbia River, whose downstream dams power the four-state Northwest region of the U.S. and California’s peak needs. Even this far from its mouth, many hundreds of miles downstream, the Columbia moves with a muscular current, flowing deep and dark.

 

Before Grand Coulee dam was built, I might also have seen salmon resting in pools and eddies along the riverbanks before continuing their upstream migration. The dam severed access to some 1000 miles of prime mountain spawning habitat for millions of fish.

 

My grandfather thought well of President Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration which built Grand Coulee and other dams that tamed the Columbia. No doubt the jobs building those concrete monsters of progress would have been a lifeline for many in the desperate days of the Great Depression and today power an entire region’s economy.

 

But I wonder if H.G. thought about the bitter trade-off of draining the lifeblood from what had been the greatest salmon river in the world. What a heartbreaking loss for nature and people, not least of which fishermen, from California to Alaska, who could have earned a living from one generation to the next fishing salmon runs that Lewis and Clark famously described as “so thick that you could walk across the river on the backs of the fish.”

 

Friday, July 9th (Seattle, WA to Osoyoos, BC)

 

Driving along the upper Similkameen River east of the town of Hope I was in for a spectacle. The river had been meandering leisurely for miles, coursing down the canyon, running about 70 feet wide and 3 feet deep, showing off it’s sand-colored rock bottom through crystal clear water. Suddenly the river made a hard left turn, slamming into an overhanging headwall. Funneling down to a width of just 20 feet, it plummets 50 or more feet in a foaming cataract choked with boulders and seam hydraulics that would demand downtime of any unfortunate swimmer.

 

Later, the steep, forested mountain sides of the Similkameen Valley gave way dramatically to the wide expanse of the Okanagan desert as I approached the town of Osoyoos. I stopped at 6 p.m. to take a bike ride along the Osoyoos River, levied and straightened to within and inch of it’s life for local agriculture, mostly vineyards now. The nearby town of Oliver, BC is Canada’s wine capital proclaimed a sign along the highway. Nevertheless the river’s surrounding former floodplain was teaming with life. 

Twice I saw an Osprey flying with fish in talons, and scores of sage thrashers, the local avian icon, which I hope are less endangered and controversial than the sage grouse of the western U.S. 

 

It had been a scorching day, reaching 95 degrees, and I’d been driving my air-conditionless car all day. I was relieved to see the sun, already on it’s way down the horizon, recede behind a billowing cloud bank. All beings seemed to breath a sigh of relief as the heat of the day began to palpably dissipate. I saw horses in a nearby field and slowed to watch them wag their tails happily in what I thought was relief from the waning sun. But they were more likely swatting away the tiny knats that were beginning to fill the cooling air, and my hair and teeth.

 

 

I leave Seattle today on the first leg of my trip. I’ll spend about three days making my way through southern British Columbia (B.C.) to Calgary, Alberta. The painting shown above is of Salmon Arm (oil on canvas, family collection), a town in south-central B.C. on the shores of Lake Shuswap.

 

I’ll begin posting about H.G.’s life and art in earnest from Calgary. In the meantime I thought I’d share a family travel story. My grandfather and grandmother, Hilda, and their three children, Helen, Gerald and Henry (my father) made similar trips in the 1950s traveling between their home in Edmonton and Pender Island, B.C. where they spent part of several summers together on the island.

 

In 1952, at the urging of a wise friend, my grandfather bought a beautiful waterfront property facing south over the Olympic Mountains and Swanson Channel. The property is still in the family and I’ve been fortunate to spend time there two-to-three times a year since 1998, twice seeing a pod of Orcas plying the waters of Swanson Channel.

 

Here’s a view from the cliff:

On my way to Calgary I will enjoy the luxury of traveling a well-established, relatively direct route. Back when H.G. and family made the trip it took three full days of driving. In the 50s, there wasn’t a reliable route across B.C. They would drive south from Edmonton, through Calgary and down into Montana before turning east on Highway 2, through Idaho and Washington to the city of Everett and then North to Vancouver to catch a ferry to Pender. Highway 2 was the main east-west route from the Northern Rockies to the coast before Interstate 90 was completed.

 

I think often of those trips when I’m floating along Highway 2 on the Skykomish River, an easy day trip for me from Seattle, and one I’ve enjoyed often since learning to whitewater raft and kayak on the river in 1996.

 

I’m looking forward to seeing for the first time the nearly continuous mountain terrain of southern B.C., traversing the Coast Range and the Monashee, Selkirk, Purcell and Rocky Mountains. Like my grandfather and family before me I will also be making a three-day journey, but will have a comparatively leisurely time of it, stopping to camp, hike, sightsee and mountain bike along the way.

 

H.G. and Hilda would also have travelled across B.C. after they retired to Pender in 1966. My grandfather continued his involvement with the Banff School of Fine Arts in the Rockies into the 1970s.

 

Here’s a photo of my grandfather along the shores of Okanagan Lake (1978):