Luckily, there are a few outdoor urban niches where you can escape the downtown rush and find a sonic refuge. One of these is the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden – a short walk from my office.

Click the photo above to see my slideshow (14 images) of the Sun Yat-Sen Garden.

I visited the Sun Yat-Sen garden this week on a sunny Monday afternoon. The garden’s surrounding walls and central waterfall feature provide the ideal ambience for muffling the drone and din of the city while you reflect and dream in a tranquil setting.

Inlaid pebble-tile footpaths and bridges connect the garden spaces – cool white rooms filled with pots and bonsai, carved screens and impressive wooden doorways. One outer wall of the garden offers a series of round portals to seating areas and benches that look across a quiet pond to a park beyond.

The garden is my urban refuge.

But…

It’s all over way too soon -

3-2-1, you’re back in the room.

The anxiety continues unabated.  I want to write a blog post.  I can’t write.  I resort to random tweets to help dissolve the blockage.

Or, I write well constructed emails about professional projects and initiatives, taking time to craft every sentence as if it were a poetic work.

Arghhhhh.

Somewhere within I know the answer.

And, I need an adventure.

After 30 minutes of flying we were crossing the long fjord-like inlets Toba, Bute and Knight, that carve a path between successive mountain ranges along the coast. Each range features a spectacular drop to the the ocean from its glaciated peaks.

I was thinking that with any kind of luck we might fly right past the highest peak in the BC Coast Range, a rarely visible jagged spire with glaciers flowing in multiple directions from its base.

As Bute Inlet came into view, I could see the Homathko River at its head, and as we flew on, it was becoming increasingly likely that we would follow the river to the glaciers at the base of Mt. Waddington.

Wow — within minutes a steep glacier started climbing up and up from the Homathko River until it reached the base of Waddington, granite fingers with an ice coating, reaching to the sky. Amazing, we were flying at 16,000 ft. just above the Waddington summit of 13,000+ ft.

The near (southeast) side of Waddington holds the enormous Tiedemann Glacier, and beyond this point all the way to Terrace, is an almost unbroken series of ice fields and sharp peaks that define the wilderness of the BC northwest.

In the madness and technical focus of my daily work it is easy to forget the breathtaking natural beauty that exists in this part of world. I’m truly thankful that my job requires me to see it all in my visits to the 25 colleges and universities that make up BC’s public higher education system.

d.