Glacier National Park

Listen for a moment. Water is running somewhere close by. It falls off rock faces you cannot quite see, it drips through moss, and it hisses under the road. The air is cool and damp, even in summer, and it smells of cedar and wet stone. Above you, the peaks rise steep and dark, with white ice on their shoulders. This is Glacier National Park, high in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia.

First, a small clarification that many travellers need. This is not the Glacier National Park in Montana, across the border in the United States. This one is Canadian, and it is older. It was set aside in 1886, just one year after Banff. That makes it one of the first national parks in Canada. It sits between the towns of Revelstoke and Golden, on the main road that crosses the country from coast to coast.

The mountains around you are the Selkirks. They are part of the Columbia Mountains, and geologists consider them older than the Rocky Mountains to the east. You can see it in their shape. The ridges are sharp and narrow, cut by ice into horns and steep walls. The valleys are deep and tight. There is very little flat ground here. Almost everything tilts, and almost everything is wet.

That wetness is the key to this place. Storms come in from the Pacific Ocean and hit these mountains first. The clouds rise, cool, and drop their moisture. In winter, that means snow — a great deal of snow. In a heavy year, many metres pile up at the pass. In summer, it means rain, mist, and a green, mossy forest that surprises visitors who expect dry mountain country.

Here is the first thing most people miss. Down in the valleys of this park grows an interior rainforest. It is one of the few inland rainforests in the world, hundreds of kilometres from the sea. Western red cedar and western hemlock grow tall here, and some of these trees are very old. Ferns and devil's club cover the forest floor. Devil's club is a broad-leaved plant with sharp spines on its stems, so look at it, but do not grab it.

Now, the story of the pass. In the early 1880s, the Canadian Pacific Railway needed a route through these mountains. Without one, the railway could not link eastern Canada to the Pacific coast. An American surveyor, Major Albert Rogers, searched for a gap through the Selkirks. In 1881 he found it. The pass still carries his name — Rogers Pass. The railway was pushed through soon after, and trains were crossing by the middle of the 1880s.

The railway company understood something clever. These mountains could bring in visitors as well as freight. So it built a hotel near the foot of the Illecillewaet Glacier, called Glacier House. Guests came by train to look at the ice and walk the trails. Later, the company brought professional mountain guides from Switzerland to lead them. Many people see this as the start of organised mountaineering in Canada. Today, only the stone foundations of the hotel remain in the forest.

But the snow that made the scenery also made the pass dangerous. Avalanches came down the steep slopes every winter and buried the tracks. The railway built long wooden snow sheds to shelter the line, and crews worked hard to keep it open. In March 1910, an avalanche struck a crew clearing snow from the tracks near the summit. Fifty-eight men died. It remains one of the worst avalanche disasters in Canadian history.

After that winter, the railway chose to go under the mountains instead of over them. The Connaught Tunnel opened in 1916 and took trains beneath the pass. Decades later, in 1988, the Mount Macdonald Tunnel opened as well. It is very long — around fourteen kilometres — and it was long known as the longest railway tunnel in North America. The trains you may hear in the distance mostly travel deep inside the rock.

The highway came much later. The Trans-Canada Highway through Rogers Pass opened in 1962. Building a road where the railway had struggled meant facing the same avalanches. As you drive through the park, look for the concrete snow sheds. They are like short, open-sided tunnels. Avalanches slide over their roofs, and traffic passes safely underneath. Each shed sits exactly where the snow comes down most often.

Here is the second surprise. In winter, this park is home to one of the largest avalanche control programs in the world. Parks Canada watches the snowpack closely. When the danger rises, the highway is closed, and soldiers from the Canadian Armed Forces fire artillery at the slopes. The shells trigger small avalanches on purpose, before big ones can build up. Then the road is cleared and reopened. The gun positions are marked along the highway.

The whole story of the pass is told at the Rogers Pass Discovery Centre, near the summit. The building itself is a nod to history — its shape is based on the old railway snow sheds. Inside, you can learn about the railway, the avalanches, and the wildlife of the park. Black bears and grizzly bears live here, as do mountain goats and many small birds. Rogers Pass is also recognised as a National Historic Site of Canada.

Before you leave, take a moment to look up again. The ice on those peaks is the same ice that drew hotel guests here by train, well over a century ago. The water you heard at the start comes from that ice and that snow. It runs down through the cedars, under the road, and on toward the Columbia River. As you walk back, listen for it once more. The mountains are still doing what they have always done here — catching the weather, and letting it go.