Some places are worth it. That's Mt. Edith Cavell. It's named for a nurse who treated the wounded during WWI. She was killed by firing squad October 12, 2015. Her crimes? Treating the wounded on both sides of the war, without prejudice and aiding in the escape of some 200 allied soldiers from occupied Belgium. Her death sentence was later condemned as a murder. Anyway, so that's Mt. Edith Cavell on the left, you can see it from just about everywhere in the park that's in spitting distance of the Jasper town site. Next to it on the right is Sorrow Peak. The layered ice between is the Angel Glacier and below that is Cavell Pond, butting right up to the toe of Cavell Glacier. And here's what's neat about that lake: Sometimes it just overflows Look at all those icebergs bobbing around in there. See what happens is those glaciers like to drop ice chunks the size of houses into the lake when ever they're feeling a little melty or unstable (so like, all the time, thanks climate crisis). In 2012 almost an entire glacier, the Ghost Glacier, that used to cling to the side of Mt. Edith Cavell just let go of the mountain and plummeted into the water. That lake overflowed with so much force that it sent a flash flood down the mountain, tore apart half the parking lot, moved tonnes of boulders and ripped out trees. It was an instantaneous and catastrophic landscape change that by shear luck didn't kill anyone because it happened just early enough in the morning. Most of the trail overlooks the resultant spillway, which is now too unstable even for foot travel and, given the possibility of another flash flood, strictly of limits. Sept 2021
Last year, during my first visit to this area I had to read about it from the parking lot, and peer up at the peak from the head of the trail. I couldn't get any further than that. I was a year into a severe back injury that I was beginning to assume was going to result in permanent disability. I could barely walk across my kitchen, the parking lot at the bottom of a mountain was a feat. This year I drove up the road again on a whim. It's a pretty drive, and I like the switch backs and surprise views. When I got to the parking lot it wasn't very busy, privacy gives me courage, so on a bigger whim I tied my boots a little tighter and put Badger's leash on, and I started to trudge up the trail. I'd just go a little ways, I said. I can always turn around. No one would know if I don't make it. I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about it more than once. That trail isn't long by any stretch of the imagination, but it is straight up hill the whole way, and I wish I could blame the elevation alone for how red faced and out of breath I was, but nearly two years of "barely getting around the house" does a lot of things to a body, and to a person's confidence, and these last six months I've been working my butt off to regain mobility... hobbling around a duck pond 1/3 of a kilometre at a time. Getting to know the names and relations of every person on a memorial bench along the way. But I didn't turn around. Sometimes I only trudged four steps and then I stopped and huffed and puffed and negotiated with the crackling in my spine, and then I trudged four more. I just wanted to see the lake. It was worth it.
