Day 49 – Thursday 8/25/2011

Lake Louise, AB to Green Ford Provincial Park, AB – 156 Miles

(Sorry for the delay in getting the last four days posted. We finally found wi-fi at the Library in Pincher Creek, AB, just a few miles north of Waterton National Park.)

Driving east from Lake Louise you’re on Highway 1, the Trans-Canada Highway. This four-lane equivalent of the Interstate Highways in the U.S. is the primary road link from Canada’s east coast to the west coast. Because of our extensive Interstate system with its multiple major, limited-access highways linking our east and west coasts, it would be hard to say what the equivalent would be south of the border. I suppose the closest example would be U.S. 50, the main east-west highway across our country back in the pre-Interstate days.

The first town of note heading east from Lake Louise is Banff, home of the Olympics several years ago. This is a pseudo-Alpine ski town which I’m assuming might be on the level of Vail or perhaps even Aspen. It’s a beautiful location, set in the valley between the same range of peaks that run along the east side of the Icefield Parkway; in other words, massive uplifted blocks of layered sedimentary stone. The continental divide runs along the ridges on the west side of the Icefield Parkway, and these capture the bulk of the winter’s snow – the eastern peaks get their share for sure, but for the most part lack the year-round snow caps of the western range. They do get enough, however, to create some of North America’s finest ski slopes.

Just down the road from Banff is the town of Canmore, which looks like a smaller version of Banff. It impresses me as being like Beaver Creek is to Vail, or maybe Frisco is to Breckenridge. If anyone is planning a ski vacation to Banff, it may be worthwhile to compare costs for accommodations in the two towns.

East of Canmore you make the transition into foothills terrain, leaving the mountains behind. But as it turns out, not for long, in our case. Rather than continuing down the Trans-Canada to Calgary and back-tracking down the same route on which we traveled northward seven weeks ago, we left the four lane at Exit 118, which is Highway 40. This two-lane highway leads south through what’s known as “Kanananski Country.” Don’t ask me what that means, perhaps it’s an Indian name or word. The road swings back southwest for a few miles, once more into the foothills and then into the mountains again. This road winds through beautiful mountain terrain which almost, but not quite, rivals the Icefield Parkway. These mountains are just as steep, just as jagged as those we drove through for the past two days. But there’s something about the snow, the glaciers, and the lakes that make that particular roadway so special. The high point, elevation-wise, on this highway is Highgood Pass, which is just over 7200 feet. This is actually almost a thousand feet higher than the two passes on the Icefield Parkway, making it the new record elevation for our Alaska journey – at least until we get back into Colorado. Then our planned route will take us over the familiar 11K passes along I-70 or U.S. 40, depending on which route variation we opt for. At one point along this stretch of highway we were stopped by a small herd of ten Bighorn sheep sauntering down the middle of the road. The group consisted of all ewes and a couple of lambs. Then, a mile or so farther on, there was a single ewe, perhaps lost from the rest of the herd. Other than that, we saw plenty of free-range cattle along the sides of the road. This is ranch country, and the grazing allotments are separated by “Texas gates” across the road, with warning signs posted that you are approaching these strange, exotic highway barriers. Down in Texas we call them cattle guards.

After about 70 miles or so, the highway emerges from the mountains and winds through the foothills for a few more miles before the terrain transitions into rolling ranchland. Somewhere in this stretch the highway inexplicably changes its number from 40 to 541 – go figure.

We are now camped at a quiet little Provincial Campground called Green Ford, right beside the Highgood River. This clear stream originates up on the pass we crossed a few miles back. Right now there are a couple of fly fishermen wading in the river, hunting the elusive Dolly Varden trout which they say are the main inhabitants of this stream. We speculated on the name of the campground – was it because there was an old green Ford sitting out here by the river before the campground was established? Or was it was a ford (crossing) of the river here on land owned by a man named Green? It’s probably something else entirely, but it’s fun to speculate.

Tomorrow we continue to Waterton National Park, the Canadian twin to Glacier National Park. The two make up an International Peace Park, which I guess reflects our long-standing good relations with our neighbors to the north. From there we cross the border and are back in the U.S.A. for good (at least on this trip).

Day 48 – Wednesday 8/24/2011

Icefield Parkway, Jasper and Banff National Parks – 104 Miles

Today was a glorious day, both in terms of weather and scenery. 42 degrees at wake-up, with the sun peeking through fluffy white clouds, and it stayed that way all day. By the end of the day it was in the high 70’s and we even pulled out the shorts we hadn’t worn since the first couple of days of this journey.

We were out of the campsite and on the road by 9:00 am. By the time we’d gone ten miles we had already stopped a half dozen times for photo ops. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe this grandiose slice of God’s glorious creation. This is surely one of the best, if not the best drive in all of North America. Everyone reading this should make it a goal to visit this wonderful place. As you drive it’s hard to keep your eyes on the road. Every time you look up, there’s a new vista to see. As you drive past each mountain, its character changes completely with your point of view. It’s such a jumble of peak after peak, ridge after ridge that it’s hard to make sense of the geology of this range. Gargantuan slabs of rock, thousands of feet thick seem to be uplifted at all angles, like a giant fist from deep within the earth punching upward and pushing through the crust, leaving the surface of the earth skewed left and right, north and south, east and west. The ranges to the west seem higher, and it’s in the heart of these mountains that the icefields lay. Glaciers large and small stream down the intervening gorges, some almost reaching the floor of valley, but most terminating high up on the mountain face in cliffs of ice hundreds of feet tall. On many of the north-facing slopes there are mini-icefields where the snow never melts but just keeps piling up with each seasons’ snowfall, creating miniature glaciers all of their own. They are not really glaciers per se, however, since they are not large enough nor deep enough for gravity to compress the snow into solid ice. These snow fields shear off as they reach the steep cliff faces, and with binoculars you can actually count the seasonal layers of snow like tree rings. Some of the ridge tops have snow cornices at least a hundred feet high. I can’t imagine what it must be like up here in winter – they must have hundreds of avalanches every day on these steep faces.

Our first stop of note was at a place called Sunwapta Canyon. The Sunwapta River upstream runs wide and shallow through a broad, silt-filled valley until it hits what appears to be the terminal moraine of the ice-age glacier that carved the valley. Even to my untrained eye, I can picture what happened as the ice receded. First, the water from the melting glacier must have filled the valley behind the dam created by the terminal moraine, creating a lake. Then, as the level of the lake reached the top of the moraine/dam, it started to cut a small channel through the top of the dam. It continued to cut deeper and deeper, creating a steep, vee-shaped canyon through the entire length of the accumulated rock, sand, and silt that formed the moraine. Anyone who has seen the canyon below the falls of the Yellowstone River in the park by that name will recognize what this looks like. Eventually the eroding action of the canyon-cutting process and the accumulation of more silt behind the dam equalized, leaving the stream as we see it today, meandering through the resulting flat valley floor, then boiling through the canyon and out into another broad valley below.

Another notable feature we stopped to see is the Mistaya Canyon and Falls. Similar to the Athabasca Falls we saw yesterday, this is an even narrower, more contorted slot cut by the river through solid rock over the course of thousands and thousands of years. This canyon can’t be more than ten feet wide in places; in fact, it’s so narrow and twisting that you can barely catch glimpses of the roaring water deep down in the slit of rock below. The sides of this narrow canyon, where they’re visible, show a history of the scouring action of the silt-filled water, as you can see the potholes reamed in the face of the rock at the various ancient levels of the river. What a lesson in the power of nature!

Roughly halfway between Jasper and Lake Louise, just north of the border between Jasper and Banff National Parks, is the Athabasca Glacier. This large glacier is one of the main outlets of the Columbia Icefield which fills the mountain valleys to the west. No one knows how deep the ice is in this field, but it’s estimated to be 2000 feet. The icefield covers an area of approximately 130 square miles – almost as big as the Harding Icefield above Seward, Alaska. The Athabasca Glacier is receding fairly rapidly; within the past century it reached almost to the location of the road, and fifteen hundred years ago it reached all the way across the valley to the location of the large, modern visitor center. This visitor center is a popular stop because of its interpretive exhibits, its fine cafeteria (we had a mid-morning snack of hot chocolate and a muffin), and the views of the glacier and icefield beyond. Directly across the road there is a parking lot and trail which leads right up to the toe of the glacier. Also at the visitor center one can arrange bus tours that take you right up onto the glacier itself.

The Icefield Parkway continues south toward Lake Louise, crossing over a couple of passes, one not quite 6700 feet and the other slightly over 6800 feet. These mark the highest elevation of our trip so far; the previous highpoint was in Wyoming on Day 1 when we topped, if I remember correctly, 6300 feet. At one point the road parallels a long ridge for about five miles. The face of this ridge is almost vertical for at least a couple of thousand feet except for a series of random rock shelfs. Each shelf is home to a mini-forest of dark green conifers, completely cut off from each other and from their cousins in valley below. Also along the way the road passes several beautiful, turquoise-colored mountain lakes. These lakes get the brilliant turquoise color from the glacial silt, sometimes called glacial flour, that remains suspended in the water. On our catamaran tour from Skagway to Juneau, they had a sample of this fine silt that they had painstakingly extracted from water from the toe of a glacier. It is a very fine, talc-like powder, quite similar in appearance to the flour used in baking. I forget the details of the settling process it took to obtain the small sample of powder, but it was something like five gallons of water to produce enough of the powder to fill the bottom of a typical spice jar to approximately one-half inch. And it took weeks for the silt to settle in a calm jar – any agitation at all and it remains suspended. That’s why glacial streams are always a muddy, light gray color. It’s only in a lake where the water has a chance to calm somewhat and better refract the sun’s rays that it takes on the turquoise color.

We reached our destination for the day, the Lake Louise Campground, at about 2:30. Knowing this is an extremely popular spot, our first order of business was to check in and secure a campsite. We then drove up the 5 kilometers to Lake Louise itself. I’m sure almost everyone has seen photos of this pristine mountain lake and the European chateau-style hotel on its shore. This was originally developed as a tourist destination by the Canadian Pacific Railway to lure wealthy eastern tourists to these far western reaches of Canada. They outdid themselves, because today the shores of the lake were teeming with thousands of tourists from every part of the world. There was a large parking dedicated to tour buses alone, and hundreds of mainly elderly couples with tour I.D. badges, spending their grandchildren’s inheritance on a trip of a lifetime. Who can blame them? This is a bucket list destination for sure. The backdrop of the lake is a grandiose, snow-covered mountain ridge with a rapidly-receding glacier feeding the lake. There is a canoe concession near the hotel, and on this bright, calm day there must have been thirty or forty canoes out on the lake. The hotel grounds are a gardener’s delight, with beds and baskets of brightly colored flowers everywhere. Trails set out in all directions, like spokes on a wheel. We overheard someone say there are more than 120 miles of trails in this immediate area alone. We walked up one of these, a wide, level path, almost to the head of the lake, a distance of roughly three-fourths of a mile each way. From the opposite side of the lake there was a grand view of the hotel and the slopes of the Lake Louise Ski Basin on the far side of the valley.

It’s been a long day, a fabulous day, a dry day at last, and a day to remember. The only thing that’s lacking is a wi-fi connection so I can upload this and the last two days’ reports to our blog. We’re not lost, friends, just out of wi-fi range.

Day 47 – Tuesday 8/23/2011

Mt Robson Provincial Park, BC to Jasper National Park, AB – 105 Miles

Well, you don’t have to go all the way to Alaska to see spectacular scenery. It’s right here along the Icefields Parkway, just as I remembered it from my previous trip north 15 years ago. The only difference was it was in March that time, and we were going south-to-north, the opposite direction from our current trip. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As usual, it rained most of the night. But happily we seem to have just about all the leak problems resolved. There’s still a tiny bit of seepage above the door, but we can live with that until we get home and I can pull the entire molding strip off and re-seal the joint between the roof and the body of the Tiger. The morning, however, dawned with a promise of sunshine. There were low, broken clouds over most of the sky, but plenty of blue skies peeking through. As we pulled out of our campsite deep in the trees, Mt Robson stood out in all its glory. Only the very top peak was obscured in clouds. We drove over to the Visitor Center parking lot to get an unobstructed view for photographs, and then began the drive up toward Jasper.

We didn’t get far before our first stop, Overland Falls, which is located just a couple of miles east of the Visitor Center. The falls are reached by hiking a few hundred yards down a trail from a roadside parking area. The trail winds downward through a damp forest of hemlock, cedar, and spruce/fir (I can never tell the difference between these two – gotta get me a tree book). After several switchbacks, the trail ends at an overlook just below the falls. These falls are named after an over-land expedition of gold-seekers back in the 1800’s, when most travelers took the long way around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America by boat.

Leaving the falls, the road begins a long, gradual climb up past Moose Lake to the Yellowhead Pass, elevation 3760 feet. This pass marks the border between British Columbia and Alberta, and also the border between Mt Robson Provincial Park and Jasper National Park. Just inside the border there is a park entry station. Vehicles proceeding straight through the park on their way to Edmonton and beyond are waved through, but those planning to stay within the park for a day or more have to pay an entry fee. For us, the senior rate is $16.60 per day.

After another 10 or 12 miles there is a four-way junction – straight ahead takes you to Edmonton, left or north takes you into Jasper, and right or south is Highway 93, the Icefields Parkway. Because we needed gas, we turned left into Jasper, a pleasant resort town of some approximately 4000 permanent residents which I would equate to something like Breckenridge, Colorado without the ski slopes, with a little Estes Park thrown in. It’s a popular summertime resort, with RVs, buses, and even trains (it’s on the Canadian Northern Railroad) full of tourists crowding the main street shopping district. After filling our gas tank ($1.189 per liter – several cents cheaper than BC because of lower taxes in Alberta), we grabbed a pizza for lunch and stopped at a spirits store to replenish our now-depleted wine cellar. Then it was off to the Icefields Parkway.

Our original plan was to go this way in the other direction on our way north, but we decided to wait and do it on the way home. There were a couple of reasons for this: first, we assumed (correctly, it seems) that the crowds would be less later in the summer, and also because it would give us something to look forward to on the long journey home – sort of a tonic to relieve our withdrawal symptoms after so much fantastic scenery in Alaska. It was a good choice to do so. The scenery along this highway is simply gorgeous. The Canadian Rockies, while not as high as those in Colorado, are much younger geologically. As such, they are amazingly rugged, with sharp peaks and ridges for mile after mile. Imagine if you can driving between two Teton Ranges for a hundred and forty miles. But instead of just looking at a single rank of the four or five Tetons, when you look back up the valleys between the peaks all you can see are more and more of the same. I’m at a loss for words to describe this magnificent jumble of rocks and ridges. It seems like each mountain has its own character – there are sharp peaks like Europe’s Matterhorn, and long ridges of sharply uplifted, overlapping flat slabs that look something like Boulder’s Flatirons, only multiplied a hundred-fold in both size and extent. The higher peaks are covered in snow, which lays in layers like the Maroon Bells. And ahead for tomorrow are the icefields and glaciers.

One notable stop between Jasper and tonight’s campsite was at Athabasca Falls, a raging torrent of water where the broad Athabasca River is squeezed between a cleft in the rock perhaps thirty feet wide and dropping forty or fifty feet. The river is heavily laden with glacial silt, and has scoured the faces of the rock into fantastic nooks and crannies. The result is a series of roaring eddies that captures large logs and other debris, continually spinning them as they are unable to escape the power of the water.

We stopped for the night at Jonas Creek Campground, a small, primitive loop of a dozen or so RV pull-ins and a scattering of tent sites around the periphery. I’m sitting here with a glass of wine beside our campfire as the evening tires, my computer in my lap, writing this as I listen to the rushing waters of Jonas Creek just a few yards down the hill. It’s a beautiful life, and we are so blessed to be able to experience the wonders of God’s creation on a trip like this.

Day 46 – Monday 8/22/2011

Prince George, BC to Mt Robson Provincial Park, BC – 196 Miles

After another rainy night, we pulled out of the Bee Lazee RV Park at about 9:30. After a stop for gas and to fill our propane tank, we were on our way by 10:00 am. One item of note – I was expecting to fill the propane tank at a separate pump, like in every other place I’ve ever bought propane, but the gas station we stopped at had a propane pump right out on the island with the gas and diesel pumps. The kid at the station said they actually have a lot of propane-powered cars and trucks here, and they just pull in and fill up like regular cars, except that the attendant actually does the filling because it’s a little more complicated than just sticking a nozzle in the fill tube and squeezing the handle. Anyway, that’s beside the point, but I thought it was interesting. Perhaps we’ll see more of that in the future.

We continued basically eastbound on Highway 16 out of Prince George. The road immediately starts to climb up through a low range of mountains called the Cariboo Mountains – yes, that’s the way it’s spelled, although the animal by the same name is spelled “caribou.” These are heavily forested, lush slopes, and the road winds around wide curves and up and down long grades for several miles. While logging is a major industry in this region, and large trucks with double trailers loaded with cut logs are common, they do a good job of keeping the cuts away from the roadside. You can see the logged areas in the distance on the hillsides, but there’s always a wide band of standing trees along the road if the cuts are close to the right-of-way.

Jeanette has been the tour guide for this entire trip. I determined the basic route, and she keeps the Milepost open, always looking ahead to see what’s coming up. Other than a few major activities like our fishing at Homer and glacier tour at Seward, we’ve been totally spontaneous in doing other things as we travel. It seems like everything we’ve been drawn to in this manner has been a really neat experience. In this instance, she saw something called the Ancient Forest coming up ahead, so we decided to stop and check it out. We kept our eyes peeled as we approached the designated KM post, and soon found an inconspicuous gravel drive on the south side of the highway with a small sign that said “Ancient Forest.” It turned out to be a large stand of old growth Western Red Cedar, with an interpretive trail through the forest. These trees are huge – well over a hundred feet tall, up to 16 or 18 feet in circumference, and estimated to be one to two thousand years old. The interpretive trail is a loop about a mile long that works its way first up an old logging road for a few hundred yards, then enters the ancient forest itself. It’s like entering another world. You’re surrounded by these ancient, moss-covered giants. The forest floor is a carpet of ferns and devil’s club, a low shrub with large green leaves and clusters of bright red berries. All around are fallen trees, covered with mosses and lichens as they rot away according to nature’s plan. It’s a damp and misty world, with rays of sunshine piercing the gloom here and there. And the smell of the cedar permeates the air. This is a true temperate rain forest, much like the rain forests of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula; in fact, the signboard at the start of the trail claims this to be the farthest inland rain forest on the continent. We spent about an hour and a half wandering along the trail and taking photo after photo. It’s a good thing we aren’t on a schedule or we would have been late getting to wherever we were supposed to be next. It was time well-spent, and highly recommended for anyone else passing through this area.

As the highway approaches the small town of McBride, BC, it levels out and enters the Robson Valley, a long valley that straddles the upper reaches of the Fraser River. On one side of the valley lie the Columbia Mountains, and on the other side are the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. At this point, the mountains probably average around 8000 feet, but the upper reaches are well above timberline and maintain year-round pockets and patches of snow. At one point, a small glacier can be seen in a high alpine valley, a hint of what lies ahead as we travel down the Icefield Parkway between Jasper and Banff in a day or so.

Continuing eastward, the valley narrows, and at a junction called Tete Jaune Cache another highway branches off to the south towards Kamloops, BC. Our highway, the Yellowhead, now enters the Canadian Rockies and it’s just a few miles to Mt Robson Provincial Park, a large park that abuts the Alberta border and Jasper National Park. The park is named for Mt Robson, the highest point in the Canadian Rockies at 12,972 ft. It’s an imposing chunk of granite, but unfortunately we can’t see it because of the low cloud cover and the continuing rain. Oh well, maybe tomorrow will be a brighter day.

Speaking of brighter days, remember how we were marveling at the 11:00 pm sunsets up around Dawson City? Well, it’s actually starting to get dark here by 8:30 or 9:00. Daylight changes rapidly at high northern latitudes, in fact, when we were at the museum in Fairbanks they said the sunrise and sunset changed by seven minutes each day there. That’s a lot compared to the minute or so it changes back home in Denver. So the shortening of the days we’ve experienced in the last month is accelerated by the change in latitude, plus the west-to-east travel which moves us to the other side of the time zone. FYI, the time zones for Western Canada are Mountain Daylight Time (same as Denver) for Alberta and Pacific Daylight Time for BC and the Yukon. Tomorrow we’ll cross over into Alberta and be back in our home time zone – another sign that our journey is nearing its end.