ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH

Roadside Ikebana is alive and well! It comes to you belatedly from the ‘high seas’, well actually not far off the Canadian coast, where internet access is intermittent and unreliable. Laurie and I are taking a seven-day cruise up along the coast of Canada and into a narrow sliver of Alaska that hugs the west coast of the continent. I have had to save up this posting and send it to you from Juneau the first Alaskan town where we will come ashore. 

Last week we to travelled through the Canadian Rocky Mountains. A dramatic and beautiful landscape of high snow capped mountains, dense coniferous forests, lakes and rushing rivers.

These are photos of Moraine Lake whose opaque, but intensely turquoise waters are coloured by the rock powder that washes out from underneath the melting glaciers.

Five glaciers issue from the Columbia Icefield which is a huge area of 325 square Kilometres, beyond the ‘mountain saddle’ in the middle of this photo.

We were driven up onto the glacier in busses with huge  wheels and tires one metre wide. There we got to stand on the ice and smiled in spite of the strong cold katabatic wind flowing down from the ice field.

One of our side-excursions was by boat, not canoe, on Maligne Lake. It was made famous in the 1950’s because of a Kodak advertising campaign using the phrase this is a ‘Kodak moment’.

The ‘Kodak moment’ was a photo of this small spit of land in the lake known as Spirit Island. It is an exquisitely beautiful, serene place that is sacred to the local First Nations People.

Autumn is beginning to show in some of the leaves and late Summer wildflowers.

I’m fairly sure this is wild Tansy that I saw on Whistler mountain.

Here is this week’s ikebana substitute, as I have not had any opportunity to create an arrangement. However, my ikebana eyes were enchanted by the colours on this rock surface. Colour theorists will know better. But, to me it looks like contrasting secondary colours of mauve stone and (tertiary) lime-green lichen harmonising with pale blue grey stone. Another of nature's beautiful miracles.

I hope our ikebana can be inspired by the beauty of nature, which is its true source.

Greeting from Christopher

Juneau, Alaska

17th September 2018.