North across the Canadian Rockies

June 4, 2015  We left Lake Louise this morning and turned up Highway 93 into the Banff National park.  It is one of four connected parks.  They are Kootany, Yoho, and Jasper National Parks. 

It had been raining and drizzling for the past several days.  Its been dry here so the rain is welcome,  but louses up sightseeing to some extent.  However, today its sunny with beautiful clouds above the mountains.  The highway goes through high moraine valleys with amazing mountain peaks on each side.  It is surprisingly easy driving; a wide two lane road with reasonably gentle grades.  It does go up in altitude but not like a lot of the roads through the mountains in Colorado.   Red rock pass in Colorado is stuck in my mind!  Everything that has been said about these mountains is true.  They are amazing.  Here are a few illustrations:

The mountain ranges seem arranged differently than what I am accustomed to.  They seem to be long relatively continuous chains of peaks with valleys between them.  Perhaps if you got off the highway and could go east-west you would find the clusters of peaks that you see in Colorado.  In a few places you can see up side valleys where the peaks seem to be organized like the Colorado mountains.

 

That being said, there is one really spectacular climb up above timber line.  Here is a picture looking south in the direction from which we came.  Here it was rainy and so the distance is somewhat obscured.  The dot on the highway is a truck.  One thing that is true of western Canada is that there is no shortage of conifers.  There are endless forests here and I cannot imagine how much of this land never sees a human. 





 No sooner than we had leveled out from the climb than everything came to a screeching halt.  Here is the reason for the stop.  Two Stone Goats were busy licking something out of the cracks in the road.  They knew who owned the road and even our RV wouldn't move them.  They finally moved to the shoulder and I got by, but they came right back into the road behind me.

After you go over this pass, the road stays high and you come to the area that gives the highway its name, Icefields Highway. This is one leg of a glacier that comes over at least three other saddles down towards the road.  Just at the skyline in this picture you can see the main ice field that stretches back into the mountains for a long way.  There are two busses on the left central part of the ice field and at least two parties of hikers going up the middle of the ice field.  For a small fee of $54 each,  you can ride the bus out onto the ice.  Considering how much time I spend on ice and snow, we declined.  The grey stuff on the sides and bottom of the glacier is material dropped by the last ice age glaciers.

Jasper, AB.   Whistler Campground

The Jasper National Park is the northern third of the trip through the mountains.  The town of Jasper is a really nice thriving community that is surprisingly full of places to meet a tourist's needs.  Whistler is a National Park campground just south of town.  So we found that the cow Elk were calving, the Grizzly bears were trying to eat the newborn elk and the Park Rangers were really nervous.  They were going around telling people to stay away from the animals so they wouldn't get trampled like the lady last week.






 We got the campground in the very back of the place.  The next morning nothing was dead, no tourists trampled and the rangers were still nervous.