At the start of June, I left on a road trip east with my folks to visit my cousin in Saskatoon.
We travelled through the mountains and out across the Prairies over a couple days, and then drove back again.
I spent a good chunk of that time taking photos, writing and thinking.
Consider first the scale of the Rocky Mountains. Leaving the Okanagan late in the morning, it took us most of the day to reach Creston, and another half a day to get out into the foothills and badlands of Alberta.
Those mountains were formed millions of years ago, raised up by the movement of tectonic plates on a scale the human mind struggles to grasp.
Those same mountains and the many valleys within them were then shaped by countless years of wind, rain and ice. Great towering glaciers the likes of which most people will go their whole lives without ever seeing.
Passing through those valleys I wondered, how many have not been climbed by humans in centuries, or millennia, or ever as they reach into the firmament and look down on us, riding our little automobiles and bicycles.
The mountains do not care for the water that carves rivers through, so what care would they turn to mortal works that will be less than a blink in their eyes?
They don't care for mortal constructs like nations, the mountain doesn't think about aging, they simply stand.
I am jealous of their strength, and the surety that even in a hundred million years more the roots of the mountains will remain.
The idea of climbing a mountain simply because it is exists, to paraphrase George Mallory's quote on Everest, does not appeal to me.
These mountains were not placed there for someone to say they “conquered” them, as much as a mountain can be conquered.
Consider how many failed to summit any number of great peaks, from Everest to K2, and consider how destructive even a simple mountain, not even a volcano, can be.
On the drive out east, our route took us through Crowsnest Pass, and even more than 107 years later the rock fall left behind by the Frank Slide remains almost untouched, with barely any trees or greenery among the field of stone.
There is little sign of buildings buried under the rubble, or the dozens of people it killed. Less than two minutes, that is how long it took for the mountain peak to not only reach the valley floor but to race up the hill on the other side.
Nature is majestic, and powerful, and deserves to be respected.
Across the Prairies, the air had a haze of smoke to it from the great fires currently burning in multiple provinces. In Saskatoon, we stayed in one of the last few rooms available, with many others filled with evacuated families from further north.
It's not controversial to think that centuries of thought that mankind could bend the world to its will without repercussion is proving to wrong, year over year.
We can't bend the mountains though. Never really could. A tunnel doesn't bend the mountain, a road etched into the side will be a faded scar in a couple centuries.
It’s humbling.
One day I will die. The mountains will remain.
When even the memory of me is gone, the mountains will remain.
I wish I could be that enduring, that solid. I can't, but I can still learn from the experience, to be more aware of my fleeting time, to how swiftly a life can change, and to better respect this world.
Capturing those lessons, those little moments, in photos, in the laughter of family, in my heart and mind, that makes that trip all the more worth it.
Brennan Phillips is a journalist with Black Press at the Penticton Western News.
