Rockies Summit Gallery

Because we needed to abort the Athabasca summit (the mountain in the background: we made it to just below the horizontal crevasse near the top) due to weather, we decided to climb an adjacent mountain called Boundary Peak. It is the boundary mountain between Banff and Jasper. This one stands at 2800 meters and was once, I suspect, much taller. We often think of mountains as solid structures and while they are, they are also completly fragile. When looking from ground level we see a solid rock. When we are on them we see crumbling all around on a massive scale. Freeze, thaw, wind and rain, reduce everything to essentially rubble. What was once tall and mighty soon (in evolutionary terms) becomes fragile and disappeared. Still a beautiful mountain with beautiful views requiring some scrambling to ascend, it is now just a shadow of what it once was.

And so in its honour I have renamed it Ozymandias.