A monolith towering over the town of Squamish, the Stawamus Chief formed in the subterranean volcanic chaos of the Cretaceous Period. One hundred million years of erosion brought The Chief to the earth’s surface, and the retreat of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet (which met the Laurentide Ice Sheet at the Rocky Mountains) left its granite slopes steep and smooth some 20,000 years ago.
“It’s basically an hour-long StairMaster,” explained my cousin Laura, who graduated this year from Quest University Canada, a ten-minute drive from the trailhead.
To the Squamish First Nation, this mountain is a place of spiritual significance. Tradition holds that the Xáays, or Transformer Brothers, created The Chief by turning a great longhouse to stone. The gaps between the mountain’s three peaks, it is said, were formed by the two-headed serpent Sínulhka as it slid its caustic scales across the rock face.
From the first peak, you can see all of Howe Sound and all of Squamish. That tiny cluster of buildings to the northeast is Quest, where for four years my cousin prepared for her future. The last time Elena and I were in town, we’d heard Laura present her thesis (the effects of noise pollution on Pacific white-sided dolphins) and gone to her graduation ceremony. Except for the instant when your friend, your relative, walks across the stage for their diploma, graduations are horribly boring. But as boring as they are, they provide us an opportunity to reflect on the advice given the graduates, and to decide whether and how to apply that advice to our own journeys.
From the top of this mountain in a land more peaceful than the one I’d just left, that’s what I was thinking about—where should our journey go from here?
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