Dans Papers - May 25, 2007 -And Where did You Spend Last Winter?

In the off season in these parts, things slow down and those of us who live here full time get to go away for awhile. Usually, we are off to see the sun, but sometimes it is just that we want to go off on some adventure.

"How was your winter?" is a common question in early May.

I asked that of Fraser Dougherty one winter. Fraser, who runs East Hampton Studios, had been in Key West aboard his 55-foot sailboat when, in one marina, he came upon a brochure for a small marina in a town on the west coast of Cuba. Hey, that's only ninety miles, he thought to himself, and so he sailed all night and the next day was tying up in that marina, without passport, papers, permission or even a basic grasp of the language. He had lots of American dollars though. And after a week of spreading it around, the townspeople came down to the dock and cheered him on his way as he sailed off.

Those are the sorts of adventures I am talking about.

Last winter, Chris and I went off to Africa on safari for the month of March. Up close and personal, we saw lions and cheetahs and leopards, elephants, hippos and rhinoceros, giraffes and gazelles and zebras. While we were in Botswana, we were told that, the week before, a physician from Pittsburgh had been eaten by a crocodile, while rowing in the Zambese River. People looked down as they told us that. They kicked at the dirt. But he had deserved it. That's what you get when you poke a sleeping crocodile in the eye with an oar to see if he'll flinch. He shouldn't have done that.

This year, having survived the Africa experience, it occurred to me that we ought to take a winter vacation that was a little less dangerous. We chose the Canadian Rockies and the Pacific Northwest. We went to Seattle, Vancouver, the Olympic Peninsula, the Vancouver Peninsula, Victoria, Jasper, Lake Louise, Banff and Calgary.

"Try to stay under the overhang," our guide said. This was on March 17, a cold, drizzly day, according to my diary, and we had just hiked three miles up the Maligne Canyon River outside of Jasper to a spectacular place where 100-foot waterfalls had frozen in place the previous autumn. This was the famous Miligne Icefalls, according to brochures, and you could hike to them all winter long, but now they were cracking and creaking and occasionally sending rocks and ice spears down at the ten of us that had taken this climb.

"It's worse today," the guide said. "I think we're only going to be able to do this tour a few more weeks. Normally we go another month."

Under that granite overhang, the water dripped around us. A large rock skidded down and crashed on the ice ten feet away.

"Stay clear of there," he said. "Follow me."

We sure did. And leaving the crumbling walls of this canyon, it reminded me of some James Bond movie where the good guys flee the island just before the volcano explodes and buries all the bad guys and their nuclear ray gun machines.

Five days later, on a sunny day at 40 degrees, we hired guide Alan McQueen to take us up to the top of a Rocky Mountain. I had never climbed a Rocky and I was skeptical of it.

"It's one of the smaller Canadian Rockies," McQueen said as we stood in cleated boots at the bottom of it. It was called Tunnel Mountain. I noted to him that this was a sort of contradiction, but he said there was a reason for this.

"When the railroad surveyors first came, they surveyed up to this mountain, came to the conclusion they'd have to tunnel through it, and so named it Tunnel Mountain. But then the next surveyors came and said no we think we can go around Tunnel Mountain. And they did."

The beginning climb looked pretty steep to me, and I suggested maybe it was not something I could do. But he assured me that after this first steep climb, and after it got into the woods, it was just a series of gentle switchbacks all the way to the top and we could walk it. Right.

Part of the way up, he talked a bit about the bears. He had seen many of them, he said, but now they were hibernating. "Don't worry, they won't be waking up for at least another three weeks."

Climbing further up the switchbacks, I remembered what I had been told in Jasper in the ice canyon about the tour ending two weeks early because of the warm weather. I was not comforted by this thought, especially as it might relate to bears.

Up at the very top of Tunnel Mountain, we looked out over a 2,000-foot cliff to the skiing town of Banff, to the Spray River and the Fairmont Banff Springs Golf Course and -- was that a black bear with a five iron?

You may have seen some of the pictures of these grand woodland hotels in western Canada. They are castles, really. All are owned today by the Fairmont Hotel chain, which will soon, after the renovations are done, reopen the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

How these castles came about is that, way back in the early 1900s, the Canadian government promised to open up Vancouver to the rest of the country by railroad if Vancouver and British Columbia would agree to join the country of Canada. Opening up the west meant driving the railroad through, and the owners of the railroad -- the Canadian Pacific -- built these great castles out there that wealthy people in the east could go to visit by buying tickets on the railroad. When you go to the Canadian Rockies today, it is at these castles that you should stay, if you can afford it.

We stayed in one in Banff -- the Fairmont Banff Springs -- we stayed at the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, at the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, and one right on the bay at the western coast of Canada in the provincial city of Victoria, which I found to be one of the most beautiful small cities I have ever visited. All the Fairmonts are fabulous.

The one in Victoria, called the Fairmont Empress, presides over the busy harbor of this stunning port city. High Tea is served in one of the grand ballrooms of the Empress at three p.m. every day and if you go to Victoria, you have to go to High Tea, whether you stay there or not. To the left of the Empress on the harbor is the Native American Museum, world renowned, and then the parliament building -- Victoria is the capitol of the province -- and to the right of it is the downtown shopping street heading away from the harbor. This city closely resembles a small city in England -- and it is one of the most elegant places on the North American continent, in my opinion. The only other city of this sort I know is Charleston, South Carolina. Victoria is also festooned with flowers, even in March. The Butchart Gardens north of town are a national treasure. It never snows, even though it is Canada -- and in the evening, the city glows with lights that shimmer across the harbor of this small sophisticated regional capital.

I really can't say enough about this little-known gem of a city. During the day, the harbor bustles. Buoys mark off two runways in the harbor and every ten minutes or so, a seaplane roars off or comes in for a landing. Victoria Harbor is an official airport, the only harbor in the world that has this designation. It has a control tower building on a pile of rocks in the middle of the harbor. Boats putter around, including ferryboats from Seattle and Vancouver, but when the lights alongside the runway flash, the boats stay clear to let the plane arrive or take off.

Before arriving in Canada at Victoria, we enjoyed driving around the Olympic Peninsula across from Seattle before we headed up to Victoria (a three-hour ferryboat ride), and we visited two Indian reservations, took photographs of American Bald Eagles -- four all together, soaring around so beautifully -- and stayed at a remarkable bed and breakfast called Domaine Madeleine in Port Angeles, where we had a breakfast so wonderful we had the management write down the recipe for the Strada they prepared. (Find it at the end of this article.) We also stayed at the Straitside Resort in Sekiu on the north shore of the Olympic Peninsula. Sekiu reminded us of the Montauk Fishing Village.

Mount Olympus, the grand peak of the Peninsula, was clouded over when we were there and many of the passes were closed because of mudslides or floods. We were told of one tourist who had rented a car and got stuck up there. He had been airlifted out after two days, but his car was still up there -- gathering daily charges you would not believe -- or so we were told.

We did enjoy the magnificent Lake Crescent -- which mirrors the evergreen trees that march down from the mountains around it -- and we visited Rialto Beach at La Push on the Pacific Ocean, which has such a wild surf that lumber from passing ships gets ripped off the decks and washes up onto it, to then get stacked along the dune line. It's a brooding, stormy place in winter.

Incidentally, don't make the mistake we did of renting a car at Budget Rent-a-Car in Seattle and then driving it around the Olympic Peninsula to the ferry at Port Angeles. It's tempting, but because they're the only rent-a-car available for this journey, they stick it to you. We had thought the two-day journey was bad enough at about $300. But when we arrived at Budget in Port Angeles, the final cost, with extra charges, was almost $600!

A better plan would be to rent a car in Seattle and return it to Seattle, then fly to Victoria. And don't use Budget.

From the little city of Victoria, which anchors the southern coast of Vancouver Island, we did fly by seaplane from the wet, watery airport in Victoria Harbor to the harbor in Vancouver -- a wonderful and spectacular half-hour trip.

In Vancouver, which is a city of two million that reminded me of San Francisco with a touch of Hong Kong, there were 60-story skyscrapers right on the bay, a huge sylvan park -- Stanley Park -- right in the center of downtown with its own beach, and nearby Chinatown and fashionable Robson Street. There was also an open-air market on its own island -- Granville Island. A tourist trolly takes you around.

I thought, Vancouver is a very civilized. I could live in Vancouver, is what I thought. But I'd have to have a place in Victoria. In Vancouver, we stayed at this gem of a small hotel right off Robson Street called the Wedgewood. It is an elegant, sophisticated hotel with its own bar and restaurant that is apparently one of the central meeting places for anybody who is anybody in that city. Another side trip we took was by charter plane, northwest from the Vancouver Airport, to the Wickaninnish Inn on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Tofino. You cross back over the Vancouver Peninsula and up toward Alaska for this journey. People had told us this is one of the most romantic spots in the world. It surely is.

All together, when people ask me about Canada and what this trip was like, I say the following:

"It's like upstate New York, but on steroids -- spectacularly beautiful, with ice fields, glaciers and mountains five times higher than the Adirondacks -- all snowcapped."

And don't miss Victoria or any of the Fairmont Hotels, particularly the one in Banff, where they have the biggest breakfast buffet ever. I thought, walking around through it, that they had everything that anybody had ever eaten for breakfast anywhere in the history of the world. I thought, somebody from the Fairmont is in Kinshasa at this very moment and sees somebody having THAT for breakfast, and the next day it is in Banff.

8 slices of bread without crusts
1/2 - 3/4 lb. grated cheddar cheese
1 pint milk
6 eggs well beaten
1/4 lb. melted butter
Layer bread and cheese
Pour eggs, milk and butter over.
Let stay in refrigerator overnight.
Bake 325 degrees for 1 hour