Bugaboo This!

When the ebb and flow of the urban densities that wash over us start to feel like riptide, we yearn for nature's open spaces. Do kids - does pre-teen daughter Katie Jane - share that quiet panic sorting out a place in the world amid all the cultural noise, the school and family pressures? Sooner or later she will, living in the middle of Washington, DC, and dad wants to impart early the tools of realignment. Nothing against the plains or oceans, but if you want to hypnotize a kid with nature, go for three-dimensional spaces with high vertical. Try the Bugs - Canada's Bugaboos - one of the continent's premiere hiking and climbing arenas.

Throw in a helicopter chauffeur, a magician in rarefied air who puts a twin-engine Bell 212 into a dive that threats a needle eye of granite spires like a biplane. Imagine that sight through the eyes of a child, jaw dropping, this new "wow" factor tumbling theme park thriller rides into second tier memory files.

Pressures ease as they thin out over an infinity of gray granite peaks wrapped in white glaciers. They sink amid colorful valleys with a rich palette of greens - from cedar and hemlock and larch - the latter in fall sliding into yellow - to stream-drenched moss and lichen, punctuated by meadows of wildflowers driven in August by the reds and yellows of Indian paintbrush, columbine, monkey flower and fireweed.

These are the views that jerk the rugs of ho-hum usual, that will put everything else in perspective. It's a lasting comfort that there are very different places that, properly shepherded, will endure and wait for us for when we need them most. When KJ, a patent pending perpetual motion machine, is on the road with me, she's overtaken by serene calm. But the underlying energy still bubbles, positively, and the Bugs can take whatever she dishes out.

Consider the vastness of the area, spilling beyond the Bugaboos into adjoining ranges of the Columbia Mountains of British Columbia. The include the world's only temperate inland rainforest, running amid the rugged peaks which are a couple hundred million years older than our upstart Rockies.

The purveyor of this experience, Canadian Mountain Holidays, operates twelve lodges, mostly for the main bread and butter of helicopter skiing, across an area nearly half the size of Switzerland. Roll all the European Alps together, and that's about the size of it. And there is a similarity to the Alps, being at the top, seeing an array of peaks to the horizon. But no people. Five lodges also do helicopter hiking and mountaineering, and KJ and I signed on for one of the family specific offerings, at Bugaboos Lodge. We flew to Calgary and motored to Banff and then a couple hours on a motor coach took us past Radium Hot Springs to a helicopter that took us the remainder.

The 35 room lodge is nearly a mile in elevation and looks up at the remarkable Bugaboos Glacier, flowing around the stunning Houndstooth outcrop, which tops out at 9,250 feet, all framed by a forest bowl and higher granite spires. It's a dang impressive swath of white for August, even if considerably trimmed from prior glory by global warming.

The guides, most of whom are also ski pro's who never let career stand in the way of a good life, exhibit a genuine joy, and skill, at working with young people, from early grade school to teens. I marveled at the heights they could coax KJ to climb, beginning with the daunting four story climbing wall that runs along side a high stairwell.