Some Kind of Beauty

My day job here in Jasper is taking people out on horseback rides through the mountains. I typically ride about 4-5 hours each day, and in the summer, the stables is busy enough that we have over 100 riders a day.

My favourite part about my job is that I get paid to ride horses in the mountains. A close second favourite is the people I get to meet.

In one day, I might have guests from Australia, Belgium, England, and South Korea. I get to hear about people’s travels through Canada and across the world, and on the best rides, I get to hear a little bit about people’s homes and their lives there.

Last week, one of my guests was a really nice man from North Carolina. He told me about the black hills of North Carolina; they’re much flatter and less outwardly spectacular than the Rocky Mountains, but he told me they had their own type of beauty.

And he said something that stuck with me: “There’s some kind of beauty in every place I’ve ever seen.”

From my travels so far, I’m inclined to agree with him.

Here’s some quiet moments of beauty in Jasper from this past week:

Peace on the shores of Patricia Lake:

The beaver boardwalk in Hinton, a town about forty-five minutes’ drive from Jasper. If you go here just before nightfall, you can often see beavers swimming around. Here’s the sun setting over the beaver dam: