We hiked through a park ravaged by a wildfire — and yet, we felt hope

This is a First Person column by Brad Nichol, who lives in Rosthern, Sask. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, see the FAQ.

Ahead of us, along a steep open saddle arced between two mountain peaks, a thread of a trail stretched across an exposed slope and finished with a steep zig-zag of sharp turns up to the top. I paused and said quietly to our son who chose this particular hike, "You do know your mom isn't crazy about heights, right?" 

Our family has made day hiking in our mountain parks an annual pilgrimage for most of the past two decades. My wife and I became hikers in the early years of our marriage as we accompanied her parents, who regularly spent a couple weeks every August roaming the trails in the national parks of British Columbia and Alberta. It was on a hike with her parents in Waterton Lakes National Park, on the now-famous Crypt Lake Trail (somewhere just between "the tunnel" and "the cable") that my wife discovered not a fear of heights necessarily, but perhaps more of an ominous discomfort around elevated exposed locations with nothing to hold onto. It was there that we developed a small accommodation to keep her hiking boots from seizing in place. I removed my belt, looped it to the back of my day pack, and she held onto it.

So now, back with our 22-year-old son, who had spent the summer working in the same national park, I knew what I had to do despite my son's assurances that the Carthew Alderson Trail was a popular day hike with people who had even less experience than us.   

With my wife holding onto my belt, we crossed that exposed slope through the open saddle. It was, we decided as a family, more breathtaking than harrowing. Cool wind gusts rushing up its face offered some assurance against the steep grade. Packed with dusty red soil, the steady and firm path led to the top with relative ease. Atop the saddle, the path along its apex widened with trails leading to a breathtaking summit overlook.  

Described in the local activity guide as one of the most visually rewarding day hikes in the park, I was curious how the billing would hold up. In 2017, the Kenow wildfire engulfed 80 per cent of Waterton's forests and the evidence of the fire was still  everywhere. From the saddle lip and the summit overlook, the breadth of the 35,000 hectare fire was vast even six years later. 

Old growth forest at both ends of the trail were spared much of the fire's thoroughness. But ascending beyond that, hikers soon emerge from the remnants of a Jurassic-like world of ferns and verdant grasses protected by the still-intact lush canopy into a world that still feels ravaged. The change is dramatic. 

Stark white and silver spires of burnt conifers, some still shedding their singed and scorched skin, spike skyward like spears from the mountainside. Eerily frozen in place, the remnants of smaller trees, bent and thorny, bow as if forever pious. A forest's Pompeii. The scent of soot and ash still hangs faintly in the air. 

From the summit overlook we wondered at the areas spared the fire's reach. As with the Carthew and Alderson lakes, other high mountain lakes we could see south across the Montana border appeared untouched, perhaps spared by height, nearness to water, rock, wind or some other caprice of nature.  

Despite the intense heat of the wildfire, the burned mountain seemed teaming with life. Waves of fireweed, exposed to the sun, crashed upon the mountain in sprays of pink. Tall grasses and countless wildflowers growing in their wake shrouded the charred remains of the old forest and nurtured the beginnings of a new one. 

Occasionally we would step off the trail and part some grasses to find small saplings beginning their journey.  

It was absent that day in July as we hiked, but the heat, smoke and haze of this year's "summer of fire" was a thought never far from my mind. Our air this day was clear, clean, and even a bit cool. 

As our son led us down and through three ice blue lakes rimmed with pockets of snow, the only sounds punctuating the wind are the squeaks and whistles of rummaging marmots and the gurgles of streams, one lake gently falling into the next. 

Paahtómahksikimi is the Blackfoot name for Waterton Lakes. It means "the inner sacred lake within the mountains." It seemed to describe the place we arrived at. Set beneath the massive vertical wall of the mountain for which it is named, Alderson Lake felt profoundly silent and is unspeakably blue. We sat and stayed for a while. 

We resumed the trail that descends back into town, our son leading the way. We again walked in a zone of transition, the forest floor green and reaching among the charred spires. How many years until the evidence of fire is absorbed by this tide of renewal, we wondered? It will be in our son's time we think, if all goes well. Maybe his own children's time. 

We planned to hike again later in the week when our two other children joined us in the park, and it occurred to me that we are passing along a penchant for the simple joy of roaming mountain trails. This park, scorched by wildfire almost a decade ago, shows signs of regeneration and maybe even hope that natural cycles of order can still exist — rain, sun, fire, ice, the seasons, life, death, rebirth — one generation falling gently into the next.

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