Spirit Island

Suzanne

5 min read

A long awaited trip to Spirit Island in very inhospitable weather.

Spirit Island is a bucket list item.  Normally we shy away from bucket list items as they are generally accompanied by hordes of people And we prefer to be off the beaten track with our own thoughts for company.

But Spirit Island has always held a fascination for me with its First Nations connections.  As this is a journey with special meaning I felt I needed to be at one with Spirit Island.

If we could get there by ourselves we would do but the only way of getting there is by boat - either through an organised trip or by canoe which takes 10 hours to paddle to the island.  Frankly the days of my paddling a canoe  for 10 hours are long since gone if, indeed, they ever existed!  So a boat trip it had to be and we signed up for a late afternoon trip at 5pm on the bleakest of bleak days which had some remarkable benefits in the long run.

Fortunately, the boat wasn’t packed, around 25 people taking this trip.  The rain has been incessant and the temperature has plummeted to 4 degrees.  On the high mountains around us this mean snow. And so appeared beautiful snow covered mountain tops peeking through the mists.  But boy was it cold for a mid August adventure.

We have history of snow in Jasper.  Once we set off from Vancouver in mid September in shorts and sun glasses to arrive in Jasper as the snow pluthered down - huge chunks of the stuff that it was touch and go whether we would make those last few miles.

So it was that 25 of us set out this late afternoon across the Maligne Lake to see and experience this bucket list item.  It is cold and misty, which adds to the atmosphere. My wish to be there is based on a myth, but a myth that holds meaning.

The island is a spiritual place for the Stoney Nakoda First Nation.  They believe that mountains are the physical representations of their ancestors and the fact that Spirit Island is surrounded on three sides by the same mountain range is a very rare thing and gives meaning to the Stoney Nakoda.  Legend has it that two young lovers from  feuding tribes used to meet secretly on the island.  The young woman, however, confessed her forbidden affair to her father, a notable chief, and her banned her from returning to the lake forever.  Heartbroken, her lover continued to go to the island in the hope of seeing her again.  She never came and the young man restlessly roamed the island until he died there and his spirit still resides there.

the island, therefore, is hallowed ground for the First Nation and visitors are not allowed on the island.  Stoney Nakoda still visit the island which is now embedded deep in their lore.  When they first frequented the area and Maligne Lake they would hunt and gather food in the summer.

No doubt the lake and Spirit Island would have forever remained a secret with the Sstoney Nakoda but for the intervention of Mary Schaffer, notable explorer and mountain woman, and Fred Brewster - he of Icefields Parkway fame!  In the early 1900s Mary, on hearing of a beautiful lake, set out to discover it with the help of a Stoney Nakoda guide.  Ultimately, after a few false starts, she discovered the lake and the island, surveyed it all and named the mountains.  By 1927 Fred Brewster had built the chalet at the top of the lake and began commercial operations alongside a boathouse built the following year by Curly Phillips.

And what of Spirit Island? It is stunningly beautiful, even more so in the  mist with half occluded mountains holding sway.  And I’m sure I could hear the sob of a young man on the island!

you will know the island in an instant.  It has been at the forefront of a Kodak Colorama competition in the 1960s; it is the most photographed image in Canada; it is also not an island at all being attached to the main land by a thin sandbar.  It is a Microsoft Windows screensaver  - but, above all, it has a seminal power of its own.




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Alberta

Tags

Spirit Island, First Nations, people, lake, mountains, snow

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