Jasper’s outfitter lifestyle stars in entertaining, enlightening read 

Geologist Patrick McLaren has created a solid bedrock on which to recount his charming memoirs.   

Magic Travels: The Unlikely Adventures of a Geologist is McLaren’s first book. The title presents an unassuming facade, but what lies beneath the cover is a fascinating, humble portrait of a life well- explored.   

The book begins as McLaren is delving back into his love of performing magic while as a researcher at Cambridge. With few geology job prospects and a pressing need to put food on the table, his abilities to make dice disappear and extinguish cigarettes with his bare hands come in handy. 

But more than a side-gig, magic is McLaren’s icebreaker, his hall pass into unfamiliar cultures and his tried-and-true tool for breaking down language barriers—whether German, Yorkshire or Inuktitut. 

McLaren’s capable prose gallops alongside the cowboys he packed for in Jasper National Park’s wilderness, and it alights on the high ridges of the Canadian Rockies, where as a field researcher, he mapped the geology of the mountains. 

Jasper readers will find most alluring those passages which reminisce about McLaren’s time spent under the tutelage of legendary Jasper outfitter, Tom McCready. The then-16-year-old’s cowboy education came at a fast clip, but by “grabbing a hunk of mane in one hand and not letting go,” a young McLaren eventually learned to pack well enough that he could make himself useful.

In 1963, along with chores around McCready’s trails and barns, that meant helping set up a tent city in the Tonquin Valley for ambitious Alpine Club of Canada climbers of the day. McLaren recalls warmly needing all of his faculties to stay on his mounts, perfecting the diamond hitch and making fast friends with timeless characters born of the backcountry. 

“If I have any claims to being able to tell a yarn, I took my training from those years,” McLaren has said.

Honest and articulate, McLaren’s memories are of a life thrilled by scientific discovery, exploration and high art. At the same time, he venerates the dude-outfitters, bush pilots, sailors and catskinners he meets, without whom his expeditions would cease to exist.

Calling McLaren’s life adventures “unlikely” may be accurate, but it’s also a sleight of hand: this book is a gem.

Readers ought to dig beyond the surface and unearth its magic. 

Find Magic Travels: The Unlikely Adventures of a Geologist at the Jasper Municipal Library or order your copy via McLaren’s website.

Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com