A guide is required to enter Wolcott Quarry in Yoho National Park, since the British Columbia Park has been designated a United Nations World Heritage Site. Although it is controlled and you cannot keep the “Stone Bugs” you find, the journey can be a treasured experience even if you lead a sophisticated life.
Madison, my guide, moved among the crumbling rocks of the trail like a nimble-footed mountain goat. She kept a brisk pace in the thinning mountain air, and she wouldn’t stop climbing unless I asked her to do so, which (of course), I wouldn’t, simply because I was a boy and she a girl. But I did ask him questions about the stunning scenery, about the history of the park, and about Charles Wolcott, who discovered and quarried his treasure trove of fossilized trilobites (prehistoric arthropods) in the rock.
He couldn’t take his eyes off Madison, and she knew it! We were both young and single, and soon, my questions became of a personal nature. She responded to those as well. To me, Madison was: different, pretty but not stunning, flirtatious but in a mature way, rugged and a little rough around the edges, but in an interesting way. An hour into the walk, I forgot where she was going! She wasn’t talkative, but she did offer, not only answering my questions. Soon, her Canadian accent became like the chirp of a hummingbird in my ear. This was my fault because now I was walking so close to her that sometimes I was brushing her jeans to walk.
Interestingly, he wore leggings (a Gaussian-like strip of cotton cloth that wrapped around the ankles and legs of his blue jeans to mid-calf). I told her about them, to which she replied that they kept bugs from crawling up her pant legs. To that, I said, “But they have a color and look like the leggings worn by Allied soldiers in World War I.” For the first time in our walk, Madison stopped and turned to look at me, and for the first time she suggested that we stop walking. “Let’s go sit on that flat rock over there.” She pointed to the rock.
“This set of leggings belonged to my great-grandfather, who was in the Canadian Third Division,” Madison told me. “He used them at the Battle of the Somme in World War I.” He was stunned. She explained that he had survived the war and had become a thing with his sons and daughters to have and use some of his equipment. Leggings were what had come to him three generations later. She wanted to know everything she could about Madison.
She insisted that he have the services of a professional guide, for which she had paid him. But she was my guide in other ways in our camp that night. I will just say that Madison was a talented cook and she ran a disciplined camp. Fluent in three languages, Madison shared with me many stories that she had received from other tour clients, in the language of my choice. Since I understood that she was a full-time guide, hiking and camping in the Canadian Rockies all the time, I asked her how she could do that, since she had a lot of talent that could translate into a better paying job in the city.
“You and I are the same,” Madison told me. “You work in an American city to make money, then you come to a wild place because you want a wild experience. I live in a wild place and I make as much money as you do by playing poker and trading stocks during the day, so I can live wild.” here all the time.”
I thought I came on this trip to see the scenery and take home a trilobite fossil as a souvenir. Instead, I got a trip to serendipity. Sometimes it scares me that I might never get over that experience. By the way, Madison caught me with a little trilobite fossil. She took it from my hand.