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On the weekend when most Waterton businesses were preparing to close for the winter, the place was abuzz with activities of the conference and festival kind.
But, you’d hardly know it.
Peaceful Sunday morning, the wind on Upper Waterton Lake had waned from a howl the previous day to a whisper, the only movement on the water from the occasional feeding fish or gulls plopping onto the surface.
Couples hand-in-in hand dotted the path along the lake shore or cuddled on the rocky beach.
Up the Akimina Parkway, Cameron Lake was equally still, save the ripple from the odd canoeist paddling under a brilliant sky. The trail down the lake’s west side was simply, well, quiet. The few walkers to the trail’s end – fenced to keep people and grizzlies apart – just absorbed the beauty and smiled a lot.
This time of year, peace is perhaps Waterton’s main attraction. Given the annual park visitor count – 386,524 last year – it’s pretty laid back most of the time.
Glenn Coulter, co-chair of the 77th Waterton-Glacier Peace Park Assembly, says the park is perfect for promoting peace because “it’s such a peaceful environment.”
As well, wildlife don’t recognize a border. In fact, except for a swath that’s supposed to be kept open, there’s nothing to distinguish the U.S. from Canada here.
The assembly, this year organized by Lethbridge Rotarians, included a ceremony at which 200 people lined up on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border between Waterton and Glacier parks “to renew their support for peace between the two countries.”
Waterton-Glacier was the first peace park, approved by Parliament and Congress in 1932.
Now, peace parks number 190 around the world, says Dr. Coulter.
“It’s an example we hope continues to catch on. Wouldn’t it be great to have a peace park between Israel and Palestine?”
While Rotarians celebrated peace, the 3rd annual Waterton Wildlife Weekend festival attracted double the number of people it had a year earlier to learn about Waterton wolves, the effect of people on elk migration, wildlife tracks and scat and bear habitat.
But the park absorbed them all well. Even the wildlife photography offerings emphasized the mandate “not to disturb the wildlife but, rather, let the animals become accustomed to our presence so that we can view and photograph them in their natural state” with long lenses.
Beth Russell-Towe, one of the festival co-ordinators, says the fall wildlife festival and the spring wildflower sessions “help people to more deeply appreciate what we have here.”
It’s not hard to picture water from a thousand trickles into Cameron Lake leaving via Cameron Creek to cascade down the mountain and over Cameron Falls, then gently into Waterton Lake.
Leaving Lower Waterton Lake as part of the Waterton River, it crosses under the Highway 5 bridge and passes miles of remote farmsteads, then past the Waterton Colony at the mouth of Waterton Reservoir.
Below the reservoir, it continues its long journey, joining the Belly, Oldman, Bow, South Saskatchewan and North Saskatchewan as the Saskatchewan River flowing into Cedar Lake then Lake Winnipeg.
From there, the Nelson River takes it into the Hudson’s Bay and beyond.
Spreading Waterton peace.