Journey Through the Canadian Rockies Amid Wildfire Alerts

We spent this new week crossing the Canadian Rockies amid wildfire alerts. We began the journey with a visit to Jasper National Park. We thought the air quality would improve once we reached the mountains, but after driving for more than four hours beneath a dense layer of smoke, we found ourselves alternating cough syrup with fits of coughing, several packages of tissues with bouts of sneezing, mint lozenges with our irritated throats, and eye drops with the constant itching in our eyes. In the end, we surrendered. This was a battle we were not going to win…

The road to Jasper was deeply saddening. The mountains and rivers passed before us like ghostly images or overexposed photographs.

“Well, perhaps once we cross the border into Mexico, we’ll finally leave the smoke behind,” we thought.

The idea struck us with overwhelming force because, as the days passed, we realized that although we might eventually escape the cloud, that was not an option for the millions of people who live in these regions. They must breathe and live within smoke that has already become part of their everyday existence.

What Happened in Jasper?

Jasper is a small town, a vacation destination filled with restaurants, cafés, and souvenir shops. The streets and restaurant patios were crowded, and we were surprised to see so many families picnicking in the middle of the smoke, with checkered blankets spread across the grass and baskets overflowing with food. Children ran around happily. We saw elderly people and pregnant women walking with smiles on their faces, babies sleeping peacefully in their strollers. At the same time, we watched in astonishment as everyone seemed oblivious to the toxic air they were breathing. Life continued despite the orange and red alerts arriving constantly on our phones.

Although a few people wore the masks that had become so commonplace during the pandemic, they were no longer available for sale. By the time we went looking for them, they had disappeared from the shelves. I felt as though I were living inside a movie, experiencing something that was not real, almost as if someone might press a button and make the smoke suddenly disappear.

We had reserved a campsite, but we were forced to cancel it without a refund. When we tried to find alternative accommodation, every hotel was full. The visitors’ center located the only available room within our budget, but it did not have a private bathroom. I pictured a hostel filled with bunk beds and crowds of people snoring, but if that was all there was, that was where we would go. Camping under those conditions was absurd. We were also frustrated that, after traveling all that way, we might have to leave without seeing the turquoise lakes, the rocky mountains, and their glaciers.

When we found the address, we were astonished. It was a historic building constructed in 1927 with all the grandeur and decoration of the period: mounted animals, wood-paneled walls, and enormous crystal chandeliers.

While I traveled through time, I heard Martín negotiating with the management because our room had already been rented to someone else. Meanwhile, I could not reconcile the mental image I had carried with me and the luxury of the place. I assumed that perhaps the more “modest” rooms were hidden in the basement.

Finally, I saw Martín smiling and holding the key card to our room on the third floor. We climbed a spiral staircase covered with plush, dark-red carpeting, bordered by a carved wooden handrail and walls decorated with paintings of hunting scenes.

We opened the door and stared in amazement.

“A private room with its own bathroom! What happened? How did you pull off this miracle?” I asked Martín.

“Because our reservation had already been confirmed, they gave us a more expensive room while honoring the rate we had originally booked.”

We felt like millionaires. The only thing that surprised us was finding the window wide open, perhaps as an attempt to “air out” the room. We closed it immediately, took hot showers, and slept like royalty.

At midnight, we awoke to an uproar. I went to look through the window and saw dozens of teenagers standing in an enormously long line. I imagine they were waiting to attend a concert or a party. The girls, wearing sequined miniskirts and asymmetrical tops, walked on impossibly high heels. In contrast, the boys wore open leather jackets, wool beanies, and combat boots. Their clothes screamed “a night out in Toronto or New York,” creating an almost comical and unreal contrast with the toxic, smoke-filled sky and the stillness of a summer night in the small town.

As soon as the commotion subsided, we went back to sleep. When we awoke, we saw that the light rain during the night had cleared the air slightly, so we decided to continue toward Banff National Park, a place I simply could not miss.

Because we had arrived the previous day in the middle of a dense cloud, I did not have a clear sense of where the town was situated. I was standing in a community that, only two years earlier, had survived the worst disaster in its history, when a massive wildfire burned 30 percent of its urban area. In daylight, the thick smoke surrounding us took on a new meaning: Jasper lived and breathed in the shadow of a giant wall of fire that had changed its landscape forever.

The fire had burned approximately 32,000 hectares of the park. It swept violently into town behind a wall of flames one hundred meters high. Of Jasper’s 1,113 buildings, 358 were destroyed. I found it difficult to imagine how its residents were rebuilding their town among the ashes. Entire neighborhoods were filled with temporary housing containers. At the same time, thousands of workers raised new structures in the middle of the smoke.

Toward Banff National Park

Once we were back on the road, we could see the full extent of the devastation. The surrounding mountains and the valley had become a vast cemetery of blackened trunks. In some places, spring had brought flowers and grasses that swayed in the breeze. Suddenly, we came upon a commotion: cars stopped along the shoulder and people running with their phones in their hands.

I found a safe place to park and grabbed my camera, telephoto lens, and tripod, although I had no idea what I was going to see. Perhaps a bear? An elk? Among a stand of burned trees, a wapiti—an imposing Canadian elk—rested on the ground, displaying its magnificent antlers. Although it was about eighty meters away, my lens allowed me to observe it closely. Minutes later, park rangers arrived to restore order. The recklessness was astonishing: people wandered into the road while drivers sped past without slowing down, the perfect ingredients for a tragedy.

We resumed our journey, and the road began following the river. I was surprised that the water looked opaque white rather than the turquoise I had imagined. I even wondered whether its waters had absorbed ashes from the dense, toxic cloud covering the entire region. I later learned that this white color was its natural summer appearance. It is known as the “rock flour” effect, created by ultrafine sediment ground down by glaciers high in the mountains and carried into the rivers, giving the water a milky appearance that seemed to compete with the haze in the air.

The color suddenly brought back a memory from three years earlier, when I visited Puracé Volcano in Colombia. There, too, I had encountered a completely white stream, although for very different reasons. As pure, transparent water emerged from a spring, sulfur from the volcanic underground had gradually adhered to the rocks, according to the Indigenous guide who accompanied me. The result looked similar, but its origin was entirely different: that stream of bright, milky water wound its way through cushions of electric-green moss. Two opposite landscapes—the Andean páramo and the alpine forest—connected by the same visual whim of nature.

Continuing toward Lake Louise, we stopped at a breathtaking place: Sunwapta Falls. There, the thick white river became a roaring torrent, forcing its way through a narrow canyon of deep rock, surrounded by towering pines that seemed to stand guard over the cascading water.

After contemplating the spectacle, we returned to the Atlas and continued toward our next destination. We exchanged the stillness of the forest for the immensity of the ice. We stepped out, ready to walk toward the edge of the Athabasca Glacier, joining a veritable army of tourists. Our intention, however, was not to touch the ice.

We walked through a chronology of disaster. The glacier has retreated dramatically—approximately 1,500 meters over the past 125 years—and continues to lose around five meters in length every year. The trail itself documented that disappearance with signs marking the years when the ice had once reached each point.

The markers farther down, near the place where the glacier had almost touched the road, were separated by long spans of time, reflecting a gradual retreat. As we climbed, however, the more recent dates revealed a brutal acceleration of the melting. Walking along that trail of grey stone did not feel like an ordinary tourist excursion. It felt like an explicit journey through the wounds of global warming.

 When Lake Louise Broke My Heart

As we left, the rain began, and we returned to the road toward Lake Louise—a visit that had been lodged painfully in my chest for days, and one I still did not know how to incorporate into my travel journal. I wanted to visit, but I knew it was going to hurt.

I had been warned that during this season, visitors needed either to arrive at four in the morning or secure one of a very limited number of reservations. We arrived at five in the afternoon, feeling our way forward without a reservation. In my mind, I chose the safe road of pessimism: I was convinced they would turn us away, and deep down, part of me was looking for that rejection as a way of postponing the pain. Destiny, however, had other plans. Again and again, the guards directed us forward, clearing a path for us that felt almost unreal.

We left the Atlas behind and started walking along the path toward the lake. I moved forward with tears close to the surface, feeling the cold air and rain burning my eyes. When I reached the shore and looked out, the beautiful lake shook me completely.

The turquoise water opened before me not as a tourist postcard, but as a sacred sanctuary. There, suspended in the stillness of its deep waters, rested a handful of Carolina’s ashes.

Although many of those who read me know her name and her story, putting into words who she was remains the most difficult part of my journey.

Carolina was my eldest niece, with whom I had always shared an extraordinarily close relationship. When she was still very young, after the untimely deaths of her parents, life compelled us to rewrite the bond between us, and I welcomed her as a daughter. I took on that role with my whole heart, from the depths of a grief we shared, but our relationship would later take an even more unexpected turn. After the joy of sharing so much of life with her and embracing her young children as my own grandchildren, life called on me to become her caregiver when she was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.

I cared for her every day throughout her illness. For more than two years, we shared an intense life marked not only by the harshness of chemotherapy and long days in hospital, but by something far stronger: our indestructible love of nature and our walks through national parks during the golden months of autumn. That was why I stood there at five in the afternoon, facing the immensity of that mirror of indescribably blue water. I was not simply another tourist contemplating the Rockies. There, I was a shattered and grateful mother, returning a part of my daughter to the landscape that had always united us.

Martín and I walked for a while in silence beneath the rain, absorbing the beauty of the place and allowing ourselves to be overtaken by the majesty of the mountains, the distant glacier, and the stormy evening light breaking through the heavy clouds.

Far from the crowds of tourists, a silhouette interrupted the line of the landscape. I saw a fully clothed man standing waist-deep in the freezing water. His back was turned to me, and he remained motionless, gazing into the vastness of the lake. As I continued along the trail and watched him from behind, I noticed that he was holding wildflowers in his hands. We exchanged neither words nor glances, but in that instant, I knew with absolute certainty that we were both carrying profound grief.

On my phone, I found the photographs I had saved from the day Carolina’s husband and children had come to this same place for their own farewell ritual. In the drizzle, I took out the phone, found each image, and carefully aligned it with the real landscape before me. Then, holding my camera in my other hand, I pressed the shutter, creating the photographs in which my own hand appears holding them within my present landscape. It was my way of bringing time together, of merging their footsteps with mine so that, although we had come at different moments, we could all inhabit the same sacred memory.

An Unexpected Storm

We returned to the Atlas and drove in silence for almost an hour before reaching Banff. We were very hungry after spending the entire day on the road, but when we entered the town, we found chaos. Rivers of tourists overflowed into the streets, the restaurants were packed, and we still had not arranged accommodation for the night. We ended up eating at an expensive and disappointing Indian buffet, but Martín, always resourceful, saved the day by finding us a motel room in the town of Golden, an hour and a half away.

We returned to the road in peace, enjoying a sky that gradually darkened among glowing clouds and gathering storm fronts. One of the truly novel sights at the beginning of this drive was passing beneath the imposing wildlife bridges spanning the highway. Seeing those elevated, living passages covered with trees and plants restored my optimism. It reminded me that many people and organizations are still fighting to protect animals.

Not long afterward, the road narrowed, and the rain began. We were delighted at first, thinking it would clean not only the dense air but also our car, which had gradually become a traveling display of insects collected across many latitudes. The amusement did not last. The rain became so intense that the headlights of approaching vehicles transformed it into a bright white wall. Then came the hail, pounding violently against the Atlas, followed by wind so powerful that it rocked us from side to side.

As soon as we found an emergency pullout, we stopped beside a truck and another car. We debated whether to wait until the storm passed, but the clock already read 10:33 p.m. The motel had warned us that we needed to check in before eleven. At the time, that had seemed like more than enough time, but we had not counted on the fury of the weather.

The lightning was the worst part. I grew up in Medellín, where electrical storms are famous, but I had never witnessed anything like this. The bolts did not strike toward the ground; instead, they traveled horizontally across a glowing red sky. Each discharge seemed closer than the last, awakening the fear that lightning might strike us or ignite another wildfire and leave us trapped. We decided to continue with extreme caution. With almost no visibility, I had to draw upon all my experience from fifty years behind the wheel before finally reaching the exit toward Golden.

“At last!” we exclaimed with relief.

But something was wrong. I thought we had taken the wrong road because the darkness was absolute. Martín checked his GPS and confirmed that we were, in fact, in Golden’s downtown. It made no sense. We could see nothing at all.

“What a strange town… It looks like a ghost town,” I told Martín.

There was not a single light—not in the streets, the houses, or the businesses. We could make out only the black silhouettes of buildings against the sky. A few minutes later, we understood why: the entire town had lost power during the storm.

We checked in by flashlight and entered our room using our camping lamp to find our way.

Once we were in bed, I checked my phone and saw an incredible news report. Because of a powerful solar storm, the northern lights might be visible that night across several parts of Canada. I had seen and photographed them extensively during the three weeks I spent in Iceland, but Martín had never seen them. Despite our exhaustion, we hurriedly put our shoes back on and went out to the parking lot with our phones in our hands. The sky had cleared, and because of the blackout, there was no light pollution. The heavens were beautiful and ablaze with stars.

Although we went outside convinced that the absolute darkness would give us the northern lights, we returned to the room without finding them, shivering from the cold. Even so, the night had given us something extraordinary: a ghost town watched over by an orange moon stained by wildfire smoke, beneath a star-filled sky that left us in awe.

The following morning was not nearly as amusing. We awoke in a town without electricity, under severe water restrictions because the municipal pumping stations were not operating. Restaurants were closed, and the gas stations were overwhelmed by endless lines of cars and trucks.

We would have to make a drastic decision because our tank was less than one-quarter full. The Atlas dashboard showed a range of 125 miles, while the nearest operating gas station was 145 kilometers away. In the middle of that uncertainty, we began doing calculations, navigating the familiar game between miles and kilometers that always frightens me on the road.

In theory, the numbers said we could make it, but we did not know the road. We deliberated for a while and decided to take the risk. The only alternative was to remain in a place without electricity, water, food, Wi-Fi, or open businesses.

We decided to continue. We turned off the air conditioning and committed ourselves to maintaining a steady speed of no more than 90 kilometers per hour, regardless of the line of enormous trucks pressing behind our bumper. That strategy had saved us on previous journeys. It was our only chance of gaining a few additional kilometers of range.

Crossing the Canadian Rockies

What we had not anticipated—the factor that threatened to destroy all our calculations—was that those 145 kilometers had to be completed through Glacier National Park in Canada, climbing through the heart of the imposing and unpredictable Rocky Mountains.

Fortunately, the drivers proved extremely courteous. In addition, the highway’s speed limit was below 90 kilometers per hour because of the steep, narrow terrain. This brought enormous relief during our forced march. What I can say with certainty is that this was one of the most beautiful roads we have ever traveled. Every bend took our breath away, and this time it was not because of suffocating smoke, but because of the landscape’s overwhelming beauty. On the eastern slope, we traveled alongside immense vertical walls of rock from which waterfalls descended directly from glaciers high above. Then, after crossing to the western side, the landscape changed suddenly, and we found ourselves in deep cloud forests filled with giant pines, where transparent wisps of ethereal mist floated lazily above the treetops.

Despite the constant anxiety about the fuel, we enjoyed every second of the drive before entering Revelstoke with an empty tank and the warning light illuminated.

If the road has taught us anything, however, it is that we never give up. Although the towns around us had collapsed into disorder, we had our own safe harbor waiting. For a couple of nights, our refuge would be a giant RV anchored in the middle of the mountains.

That enormous motorhome, temporary as it was, became my perfect fortress, an ideal shield against my fear of bears during our nights in the mountain range. With everything we needed on board and protected by our own walls, we fell asleep knowing we were safe.

Monday restored a human scale to our lives in the presence of the earth’s giants. We spent the day exploring the surrounding area on two beautiful excursions that seemed to belong to another time. First, we entered a forest of ancient cedars. Walking among those enormous, centuries-old trunks beneath a green canopy that filtered the light felt like entering a living cathedral.

Later, we challenged the elevation by driving the winding road to the summit of Mount Revelstoke National Park, where we found a true garden of flowers that I delighted in photographing. To end the day, we walked among towering trees and watched the sunset over the snow-covered peaks of the Rockies.

Traveling to Vancouver

Before leaving for Vancouver, we completed our first 10,000 miles on the road—approximately 16,000 kilometers—and needed an oil change. Revelstoke did not have a Volkswagen dealership, where I had always taken the Atlas for service, so we had to go to a truck repair shop. The owner assured us that he knew the brand perfectly well and could perform the work without any problem.

We did not drive the following day because we vwere hiking and visiting the Sicamous Creek Falls.

Yesterday, however, after traveling only a few kilometers, the low-oil warning appeared. Five minutes later, we entered a town, and only meters farther on, a red alarm warned us that we had no oil pressure. We did not manage to reach a repair shop under our own power. The employees came to our aid and had to push the Atlas inside. The mechanic told us:

“Cross your fingers. I’ll do the same. Let’s hope the engine hasn’t been damaged, because a new one costs ten thousand dollars.”

In my mind, I began calculating the cost of the tow truck, hotels, and the days we might be trapped in that town. While we waited outside, the dense curtain of smoke returned with even greater force. Just when everything seemed to be going from bad to worse, we heard the soft purr of the Atlas, without a complaint or an unusual sound. We celebrated with coffee and tea before returning to the road, which took on an increasingly ominous appearance.

Beside us lay a lake whose opposite shore we could barely see. Cars and trucks only a short distance ahead disappeared into that luminous cloud, which looked like sunset at midday. When we stopped for gas and opened the door, the smell of fire and ash struck us like the blast one feels when leaning close to blow on a campfire. The sky was apocalyptic, and we feared flames might appear at any moment. The roadside fire-danger signs displayed the word “extreme” in red. In some places, we saw small outbreaks of fire where smoke rose directly from the forest.

During our camping nights, we had learned that pine resin is extremely flammable. We used fallen branches that still retained their green needles because they ignited more quickly than anything else.

We continued driving with the hope that, as we approached the coast, the ocean breeze would have pushed the cloud away. At first, it appeared that it had. There was only a thin line of clear blue sky, which gradually widened as we moved forward. I felt as though we were shipwreck survivors scanning the horizon for the first sight of land. And yes, we seemed to be reaching that promised land where we could breathe deeply and fill our lungs with clean air—but it was not to be. The alerts continued to arrive, although they were no longer quite as severe:

“Breathing conditions will be unfavorable today, partly due to unhealthy air quality. When smoke concentrations are high, everyone’s health is at risk, regardless of age or health status. Limit the amount of time spent outdoors. Reschedule or cancel outdoor sports, activities, and events.”

I find myself wondering: can we truly live this way? Is this the life we want for ourselves, our children, and the generations to come?

Week 26 route between Edmonton and Vancouver: approximate distance: 1,380 km