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The next day, we head up to Moose Lake to find a gentle trail through dense, subalpine forest. After a morning of exploring, we emerge from the woods to lunch beside Maligne Lake and discuss our discoveries. Later, Gadd recounts the story of Mary Schäffer, the Philadelphia Quaker who found her way here in 1908 with the help of a rough map she had received from Samson Beaver, a Nakoda acquaintance. Gadd points to the mountain peaks named for Beaver and his wife Leah. He tells us about Schäffer's unlikely love affair with a much younger mountain guide named Billy Warren. They married and lived happily in Banff for the rest of their lives.

The day ends with another unforgettable story. Gadd recalls a group of Japanese students who wanted to see beavers in their natural habitat. He led them to a slough where a family of beavers obligingly showed off its talents with tail-slapping enthusiasm. Cameras clicked amid Japanese exclamations of delight. At dusk, the visitors suddenly stopped taking pictures and asked to be led back to their van. Clearly nervous about the approaching nightfall, the city dwellers hurried along the path until they were bumping into one another. The moon was full. Owls shrieked. Bats swooped. Gadd gently suggested a way they could banish their fear in a few minutes. He led them to a clearing in the dark woods and encouraged them to lie down on their backs in a circle on the soft earth, with their feet together at the center. "Just look up," he said. Together, in silence, they gazed at stars in the black night.

"This is the finest night of my life," the Japanese interpreter whispered to Gadd as he gripped both hands and said goodbye an hour later. The strangers conquered their fear of night in a Canadian forest. I will too.

JASPER IS A GOOD PLACE to wrestle with fears and overcome them. I had always been too frightened of rapids to try whitewater rafting on the tumbling Athabasca River. If you're so eager for new experiences, I tell myself a little wryly, this seems like the perfect week to drown.

The preparations are comical. Allan and I join a Frenchspeaking Swiss family, two British families and a Pakistani family from the United Arab Emirates in a dungeon below a street in downtown Jasper. Our guides provide wetsuits, river slippers and life jackets and point to two changing rooms. Six women struggle to pull wet and slender wetsuits over dry and voluminous hips. We help one another yank them up — tug, tug, tug — and can't breathe for laughing. Then we waddle to the van like damp mother ducks. Smirking husbands of any nationality risk a whack with a paddle.

We slide the raft into the river just below Athabasca Falls. "In the unlikely event that you fall out of the raft, keep your feet up so they're not caught in the rocks," our guide tells us. Two blue Canadian eyes meet two brown Pakistani eyes in shared alarm.

OK, here goes! Over the rocks and into the splashing water we sail as I try unsuccessfully to swallow screeches. "I like new experiences!" exclaims Queenie, one of the women from England, before my paddle slips out of my hand and clunks her on the head. With a grin, she keeps paddling. The speed, the icy splashing, the Athabasca itself are exhilarating. The largest river system and one of the most powerful rivers in the park, it was an essential highway across the West in Canada's fur-trade era. I watch an eagle soaring above the riverbank, and imagine the voyageurs who canoed on this river, over the same rocks, centuries ago. Did they watch an ancestor of this eagle with the same pleasure?

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