#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 24 | Context on this series – we live in a beautiful world and National Parks are akin to the crown jewels of this planet. These landscapes remind us of the fine balance and complexity woven into the fabric of the world around us. Every time I spend a while inside one of these places, I’m reminded of how precious that balance is, and how much it matters that we try to understand the complexity and our own small role within it.
I think that’s what awe really is. We reach for the word “awesome” in the moments something helps us see our own insignificance — and windows into nature do that for me every time. So this is my small way of sharing it, and passing it along.
Some places are named after people or rivers. Yoho is named after a feeling. The word comes from a Cree expression of “awe.” It’s rare for a place to promise wonder in its name, and rarer still for it to deliver.
Emerald Lake alone earns it. We stayed by the water and canoed out onto it, and the whole thing felt faintly unreal — glacial meltwater in a shade of green that looks invented, ringed by close peaks, snow, and dark treeline. A quintessential scene in the Rockies.
The waterfalls carry the theme in their names. Takakkaw, the second-tallest in Canada, comes from a Cree word meaning roughly “it is magnificent.” The place keeps naming its own feelings.
There’s history threaded through it too. Kicking Horse Pass, which runs through the park, was the route the Canadian Pacific Railway chose through the Rockies — the corridor that finally linked British Columbia to the rest of the country by rail in 1885.
If that wasn’t enough, high in these mountains sits the Burgess Shale, one of the most important fossil sites on Earth. It holds soft-bodied sea creatures more than 500 million years old — a near-perfect record of the moment complex animal life first flourished. The creatures are marine, yet they rest near a mountaintop, because this entire range was once the floor of an ancient sea, later pushed toward the sky.
It is amazing to think that you climb a mountain in British Columbia and arrive at the bottom of a vanished ocean from the dawn of animal life.
Yoho is deserving of “awe.”
A Learning a Day 