My spirit of wonder got me up here - a tough three hour slog from the trailhead on Kathleen Lake in Kluane National Park, through lush woods speckled with bright red, orange and yellow berries and up a moonscape rock glacier into a majestic cirque, surrounded on three sides by soaring cliffs streaked with snow. Then a knife-edge ridge curling upwards around the King’s Throne to the summit where I sit.
A throne fit for a king indeed. Beneath the brightly coloured, but very tattered, Tibetan prayer flags on the summit cairn stretches an endless array of mountain peaks in Kluane National Park – a chaotic jumble of snowcapped peaks and ridges rearing ever higher into the clouded horizon above which Mount Logan, Canada’s highest mountain, shimmers.
Immediately below me on the northern side is an intensely blue lake that changes hue as the sunshine plays with the reflected clouds on its waters. An island lies like a Caribbean mirage amidst the reflected peaks all around. A delta of yellow and green intrudes into the lake from the west and the distant roar of its waters is the only sound to reach this mountain top of shattered rocks. Distantly, two Dall sheep move across a scree slope and a ptarmigan scuttles among the sharp rock fragments – but otherwise I am alone on the King’s Throne, for a few moments, master of all I survey.
The sun and shade patterns on the mountainsides chase each other over fall’s brilliant yellows and a breeze now plays with the prayer flags beside me. I am loathe to leave this miraculous vista and I look for an excuse to linger for a few more minutes. There are not many moments in our busy, busy world to savour such a landscape, such quietude, such immense personal space. Such moments are precious and treasured. Here on the King’s Throne in Kluane, Yukon Territory I have found my personal bit of space and time that will sustain me for a long while to come.
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