Up the Sunbeam

-- Somehow he looked at me and still thought I could do it. Perhaps he was an angel and I was unaware. My little brother Chad and I had just entered the lodge at Cathedral Lakes Provincial Park. Since we were both visiting for the first time, we wanted a little guidance to help us decide which trail to choose for our day trip. We asked the quiet, but friendly young man who had been our driver on the 9-mile, 1-hour, 4-wheel-drive climb from the floor of the Ashnola River Valley up some 5400 feet to the lodge which sits at about 6800 feet above sea level. He told us about the popular but difficult Rim Trail, which I knew would be too hard for me right now (I have a bunch of weight to lose and a lingering problem with one foot that has kept me from doing much walking/hiking for the last few months), so we asked him for a less strenuous recommendation. He told us we could take the Glacier Lake Trail part of the way up to the Rim Trail and still get some beautiful views and that it would...

-- Standing atop the very spine of North America, the Continental Divide, I drink in the majesty of what for me, is an always-place.  This view, these rocks, this air runs through my life like a favorite melody that recurs again and again in a movie soundtrack.  It's a place I always seem to go back to, a place I never get tired of, a place I miss deeply when I'm far away. High places are always like that for me. I have never met a mountain I didn't love --the higher and more jagged and snow-covered, the better.  Shimmering with an unearthly glory, mountains are rife with evidence of an all-powerful and monumentally grand Creator-God . I am only one of the more than 3 million people who visit these mountains in a year.  Whether they know it or not . . . whether they recognize Him or not . . . each and every one, in some way, feels God on those heights. Ancient people felt God's presence on high places too. Sadly, though they felt Him on peaks and high mou...