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At times, I have brought my middle-aged troubles to these mountains, as older people do, looking to the peaks for peace and comfort. The park will celebrate its first century in September. I have been lucky to know it, in glimpses, for 38 of those years. Returning to my tent on the night of stars last July, I realized with astonishment that it had been five years since my last visit to this Canadian treasure on my doorstep. I decided to explore Jasper with my husband Allan for a week as if I had never seen it before.

THE CALYPSO ORCHID, the most beautiful flower in the Rockies, survives in Jasper's dark forests by playing a trick on the golden northern bumblebee. Young bumblebees can't resist its shape, colours and fragrance and pick up sticky pouches of pollen while searching in vain for nectar that doesn't exist. The bees pollinate the next orchid by accident in a similar search, and so a lovely purple bloom thrives in a northern environment.

"Everything in the natural world is smarter than we think it is," explains geologist and naturalist Ben Gadd as he shows us a photograph of the bee in its tango with the flower.

This is the first Friday evening in my quest to deepen my appreciation of the park. We have joined 10 explorers for a weekend course at the Jasper Institute, a non-profit wilderness education program run by the Friends of Jasper National Park. Gadd is an easygoing man of 60 and author of the indispensable Handbook of the Canadian Rockies and six other books. He has lived in Jasper for 26 years, hiking, climbing, skiing and exploring the hidden corners of the backcountry on foot. If I want to find the Jasper National Park outside my old comfort zone — beyond the easy, familiar trails and campgrounds, past the elk, mountain goats and squirrels and an occasional bear at the side of the highway — I know Gadd can guide the way.

He teaches us to look down, as well as up. The trick in Jasper is to remember that the park is not only huge, high and rugged — like the commanding Mount Columbia, its tallest peak; or the grizzly bear, elk and moose, its largest mammals — but also as fragile and delicate as the calliope hummingbird, the pixie cup lichen, the sweet wild strawberry and the emerald dragonfly. The Rockies are home to 277 species of birds, 1,300 species of plants, 20,000 species of insects and spiders, 15 species of amphibians and reptiles and 69 species of mammals. On the rocks near Medicine Lake, I learn to be as curious about the pika — a squeaking mammal the size of a guinea pig — as I am about the huge black bear scooping buffalo berries with a furry fist near Maligne Canyon.

The next morning, Gadd meets us just north of the town of Jasper on Pyramid Island, a small islet "loved to death" by townspeople and tourists early in the century, then carefully restored in 1998 by hundreds of volunteers who planted native trees, shrubs and wildflowers. Here, we wander with a purpose, searching for the unfamiliar and taking our dumbest questions to a patient naturalist. What is a witches' broom? How do you tell a raven from a big crow? Is this a cranberry? We listen to a family of loons, watch circling ravens and share binoculars to find the yellow-rumped warblers that Ed and Tom, two Americans, insist on calling "butter butts." I fill my notebook with question marks about unknown plants and tiny creatures on Jasper's soft floor. "Now think about what each plant and animal might be doing in a different season of the year," prompts Gadd. Twelve new friends sit together around a picnic table, eating summer cherries and contemplating nature's mysteries.

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