This story is the result of a collaboration with the Post Hotel & Spa.

By Lorna Crozier

“It’d be a great view if it wasn’t for those mountains.”

You have to forgive prairie people who talk like that. There are others, Saskatchewan-born like me and my companion, Tom O’Flanagan, who are gobsmacked in their presence, who develop a crick in the neck from looking up and up and up.

Leaving blooming daffodils behind, we’ve come from Vancouver Island, our home now, for a few days in the Rockies. We’ve come for snow and mountains.

Snow comes in full force on the outskirts of Calgary on our way to the Post Hotel & Spa in Lake Louise, our winter haven for the next few days. But the mountains have chosen to be coy. They make us wait to see them.

With a couple of Calgary friends, we drive through Banff National Park where we soon stop for a hike up Johnston Canyon, the four of us fitting spikes on our boots for the slippery path.

At the highest point, rock climbers skitter up the waterfall’s frozen, vertical surface like ice spiders, axes digging in the glassine columns that glow teal and turquoise, a mix of colour brewed especially for alpine waters.

Everywhere around us the snow is falling, and we’re loving it. It purifies and dazzles what it touches.

In this whitened world, we navigate the short distance from the canyon toward our journey’s end. Mounts Fairview and Temple finally shoulder through gaps in the blizzard and boldly affirm they’ve been there all along.

Majestic, a word often used, isn’t good enough to describe the summits and slopes of the Canadian Rockies. They tower silently and otherworldly above the reach of language. In the company of mountains, something deep inside us — the spirit, perhaps — breaks from the body, startles into soaring rock, ever rising, its mystery still intact.

This manifestation is why we’re here. Why holy men and women centuries ago went to the mountains for insight and renewal. Why they and we ordinary folk go there still. When you look at the mountains, when you think of them, your mind touches the clouds.

Tired from our icy hike in the canyon, hungry, and eager to see the lodging that awaits us, we finally arrive at our destination and park among the trees. The log building that is the Post Hotel & Spa steps from a winter’s tale to greet us.

The first word that suggests itself as we walk into the lobby is generosity. Patterned carpets absorb the fall of our boots, big armchairs line up behind a wall of windows to catch the stunning views and in the nearby lounge, the blaze in the huge stone fireplace crackles and flares.

Our room is an amalgam of rustic ski chalet and high-end boudoir. There’s a fireplace with kindling waiting for a match and a loft that floats a king-sized bed above the sitting room. If you don’t have time for the hotel’s hot tub just off the swimming pool, you can soak in the Jacuzzi-style bathtub with French soaps to spoil your skin. I can attest that two fit into the tub, with or without touching toes.

The Post Hotel & Spa, both vintage and modern, goes back to 1942 when a smaller version was built with logs from Revelstoke, B.C. and the headwaters of the Bow River. That may be why the building feels at home among familial trees.

In 1978, the hotel fell into the good hands of the Schwarz brothers, André and George, a pair of ski instructors from Switzerland. They restored and expanded the resort, adding among other amenities, a cozy library right out of Masterpiece Theatre and an expanded dining room to showcase their scrumptious cuisine.

Under the spell of these legendary brothers, the Post became part of the Relais & Chateaux family, a worldwide anthology of unique lodgings that promises excellence. In 2021, the Post was sold to a collection of Canadian investors and is now overseen and managed by Canadian Rocky Mountain Resorts.

Its tradition of attentiveness, charm and mouth-watering gourmet fare carries on.

Though the setting lures you outside, the meals are so delicious that you can see yourself doing nothing but eating — elk tenderloin, miso-marinated black cod, mushroom tagliatelle, veal loin Zurich-style.

Tom, taking his first bite of an appetizer described as Quinoa and Cucumber Salad (with apple, spiced creamy burrata and passion fruit) explodes with “Holy F***.” It is that good.

The beet risotto, a shallow red circle on a black plate, looks so much like an abstract painting he has to photograph it before he takes a bite. Did I mention Tom is a painter with a dog named Rothko?

Our sommelier chooses the wine for us from the 22,000-bottle cellar, one of Canada’s largest. We sip wines I’ve never come across before, from an Australian Riesling to a Syrah crossed with a Viognier from B.C.’s Naramata Bench.

We consider skipping breakfast, but one description from the lavish menu will explain why we show up every morning. Duck Confit Eggs Benedict: rosti potato, confit duck, poached eggs, hollandaise sauce, arugula, orange zest, fennel salad and lemon oil. All of that in one dish! We eat lunch in the hotel’s pub, the fare simpler but still a gustatory delight.

The servers and most of the other staff are from places as far away as Australia and the Netherlands, Somalia and the Ukraine. A highlight of our stay, they are irresistibly approachable and engaging. The young massage therapist who works out the knots in my shoulders in the intimate yet sumptuous spa comes from Belgium. When she isn’t creating miracles with her hands, she’s a ski instructor.

Our head waiter from the Netherlands, we learn, asked for his girlfriend’s hand on top of the highest run at Lake Louise Ski Resort. The wind blew away the words on his video recording but she said yes.

Flustered by his proposal, when they snowboarded down the hill she rammed into him from behind and they tumbled down, tangled together. “Sounds like marriage,” one of us says with a laugh.

Instead of taking to the slopes, we snowshoe half way around Lake Louise in a gentle winter storm, then double back across the ice. Out of the trees and falling snow, a two-horse sleigh jingles slowly past, the horses’ breath frosting their long chestnut faces.

On our last morning, from a small stone bridge, we watch one of the many freight trains that cross the creek outside the hotel. Its double — a spectral train copied in blue shadows in the snowdrifts beside the rails — speeds along beside it. Ghost-like and silent alongside the tracks, it slips through the mountain passes and when the snow stops on the other side, it suddenly disappears.

Driving back to Calgary, our friends guide us through the numinous snowy wall that you have to push through to enter and leave the Canadian Rockies, an enchanting land of peaks and valleys we can’t quite believe exists.

We were lucky enough to find a hidden way into a glass globe with an eternity inside — a building and trees, a motionless deer and white flakes falling.

I need to trace the way back to the timeless log hotel, the skating rink just outside the front doors, the trails where I’ll strap on cross-country skis and glide across the Great Divide. Who doesn’t want to say they crossed the Great Divide?

Or maybe I’ll sit in the library, surrounded by stacks of wisdom, and write a poem that in some small way touches on what these jagged peaks — so solid and yet ineffable, so inhuman and yet such a draw to the human heart — might mean.

Things are clearer here

A country of mountains and snow

You visited once in a dream.

Things are clearer here:

They shine with a light

that lives inside

the smallest prayer;

the light of stars

turned into snow,

the light inside a frozen

waterfall, water falling still

behind the towers of ice

because like love,

like goodness, like a woman’s 

wanting, water needs

a place to go.

Editor’s note: For more Toque & Canoe stories by celebrated Canadian poet Lorna Crozier, check out Worn out by Wonder (featuring Crozier’s visit to the Arctic), her profile on Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland & Labrador, Exploring Light’s Birthplace (featuring Saskatchewan), A Poet in the Great Bear Rainforest and Sidney, B.C. by the Salish Sea.

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