Project 04 of 17
Mountain and Forest
Cities & Places · Radium Hot Springs, British Columbia
Radium Hot Springs, British Columbia. Two takes, four minutes.
Three takes over the wetland had already become a film.
Then, at 16:57 and again at 16:59 by the cameras' own clocks, the same battery turned around and made this one. Radium Hot Springs sits at 808 metres on the floor of the Rocky Mountain Trench, a furrow some 1,600 kilometres long that holds the Rocky Mountains apart from the Columbia Mountains. The first take is sixteen seconds of conifer canopy with cloud caught halfway up a rock buttress. The second runs eighty-seven seconds without a cut: a highway curving through the trees, the one crossing where people stop seen from directly overhead, and the range beyond it carrying snow above a green valley floor. Nothing was staged. Nothing was lit.
- Subject
- The mountains and forest of the Rocky Mountain Trench at Radium Hot Springs, British Columbia — the Stanford Range of the Canadian Rockies standing on the east wall, the Purcell Mountains across the valley to the west.
- Intent
- Show the other half of a valley already filmed from its floor: the forest on the wall, the one road through it, and the ranges that hold both.
- Seen
- Conifer canopy with cloud caught halfway up a rock buttress; a two-lane highway curving through unbroken forest; a crosswalk, a guardrail and a pull-out from directly overhead; snow on a summit ridge above a green valley floor.
- Made
- Two takes — 104 seconds of footage — in the last four minutes of an afternoon that had already delivered a different film. Five films and nine frames cut from them. Nothing staged, nothing lit, nothing graded into somewhere else.
I
The forest
Unbroken, all the way to the ridge.
This is Douglas-fir country. It is the one tree Parks Canada names for the slopes above the village, where before restoration work began "a dark forest of tightly-packed Douglas-fir trees and moss grew here." Radium sits in the Interior Douglas-fir zone, the warmest and driest forest type in the British Columbia interior — a forest that low-intensity fire once came through every five to thirty years and kept open. A century of putting those fires out is what closed a canopy like this one in.
Sixteen seconds, at half speed, over the canopy.
Cloud, caught halfway up.
II
The road
The only straight thing anybody built here, and it is not straight for long.
In this valley the road came first. Two kilometres from the village, Highway 93 climbs east into Kootenay National Park — and that park exists because of the road, not in spite of it. In 1920 British Columbia handed Canada a strip of land eight kilometres wide on each side of the highway, in exchange for the federal government finishing it and maintaining it. The park was established on 21 April 1920, three years before the road was completed. The driving was the bargain; the wilderness was the price.
Twenty-four seconds of it, at walking pace.
Everything else in the frame was here first.
III
The crossing
A guardrail, a triangular island, painted bars, and room for a few cars.
The village below these mountains sits at 808 metres and holds 1,339 people, at the crossroads of Highway 93 and Highway 95, sixteen kilometres north of Invermere. From directly overhead the crossing reads as exactly what it is: the one place on this road where somebody thought to stop. Painted bars, a guardrail, a wedge of gravel. Everything around it was arranged by water, ice and roots.
Fourteen seconds, straight down.
Lower, closer, the forest at both shoulders.
IV
The wall
Snow on the ridge, green on the floor.
The wall on the east side of this valley is the Stanford Range — a subrange of the Canadian Rockies inside the Kootenay Ranges, official on the map since 31 March 1924. Mount Sinclair stands 2,662 metres at its north end, nine kilometres from the village. There is snow along the summit ridge in this frame and full summer green on the floor below it, which is the whole argument for the place in a single picture.
Fourteen seconds across the floor to the wall.
The far wall, under its own weather.
V
The trench
The valley, opening out.
This valley has a name and a scale. The Rocky Mountain Trench runs roughly 1,600 kilometres, from Flathead Lake in Montana to the Liard River; it is between three and sixteen kilometres wide, and its floor lies 600 to 900 metres above the sea. It separates the Rocky Mountains on its east from the Columbia Mountains on its west. So the range across the valley is not the Rockies at all — those are the Purcells, and they only look the part.
Forest all the way out to the far wall.
The last twenty-three seconds, out over the forest.
The Rockies on one side. The Purcells on the other. Everything between them is floor.
Detail → Whole
Mountain and Forest ends. 17 projects in the collection.
