According to the summer trails map published by the Friends of Jasper National Park, Trail 3B ends on the south shore of Hibernia Lake, at a sign that warns against camping on the lumpy ground. From there, it works around the west shore, squeezed between the lake and a rock bluff that rears up 100 meters.

The trail showed signs of recent use, probably from the rider who left his bike to scout ahead. We met as he retreated. Confident that I would find a way through to the Cabin Lake Trail, I didn’t bother to ask what was ahead.

Bunch berry, white blossoms floating above perfect green leaves carpeted the ground beneath towering spruce that crowded the water’s edge. Beyond the north end of the lake, the trail grew faint, but as it wound up toward the ridge, someone had cleared away a windfall with a chainsaw, and I was reassured. 

The trail narrowed, and barely wide enough for a deer, doubled back along the ridge, climbing steadily through pine and juniper, toward a grand view across the Miette Valley to the Whistlers. Cabin Lake was below, to my left and I looked into Hibernia, searching for the shadow of a fish, remembering another mountain lake, on an island at the edge of Desolation Sound, improbably teeming with small, and rapacious cutthroat. 

We walked there on a logging road, through the remnants of an ancient forest, massive stumps rising from a sea of bracken fern and salal, footnotes to a story written a century before by hand loggers with double-bitted axes, overshadowed by giant snags and new growth of towering hemlock.

A flight of band-tailed pigeons battered overhead, fleeing for their lives along that narrow avenue of light, pursued by the streaking grey shadow of a goshawk. It was my first glimpse of the rare accipiter and I did not see one again until this spring, perched atop a large spruce on Aspen Street.

The forested ridge between the lakes would be ideal habitat for  a gosshawk, according to my field guide. But in the heat of the afternoon, all was quiet, leaving me to contemplate the way that the natural world connects memories of events widely separated in time and space.

The trail grew ever fainter as it worked south, but I was reassured every now and then by the scars of chain rings on fallen logs. Someone had ridden over this trail laid down by deer and elk, keeping to the heights to avoid ambush; it did not end in a daredevil jump.   

The ridge broadened and declined down a gentle slope, into a tangle of broken pine, the leavings of a reforestation crew. Withered and brown, the slash spread over the forest floor, obscuring the last trace of the trail and its meeting with the Cabin Creek fire road.