Why twirling?

Why did I head this day with "Twirling, twirling, and twirling"? Because this is the route I drove today:

View Larger Map

If I had stayed in Sioux Falls last night, and gone directly to St. Paul, it would have only taken me four hours of driving, instead of eleven. Of course, I wouldn't have seen yet another sprawling plains city (Fargo), met the nice guy in the coffee shop, or seen Bemidji or any of northern Minnesota, so I'm glad I did what I did. But on a map, it looks like I was traveling in a circle.

Now that I know how to embed Google Maps, I'm going back to my old postings and adding maps at the end of them.

Brookings, SD to St. Paul, MN

Day 40: Sat 30 Aug: Twirling, twirling, and twirling.

When I initially left Glacier National Park three days ago, my plan was to take US 2 across the northern plains to Sault Ste. Marie, cross into Canada and come down into upstate New York to go to a Labor Day faerie gathering near Gouverneur. When I looked at that route, I realized I was going to be passing through Bemidji, Minnesota, a friend's home town. I called Chris and told him that and he said to be sure to get a picture of me in front of the statue of Paul Bunyan and Babe, The Blue Ox. Sounded like a plan.

The near accident in Alberta made me leery of driving long distances on two-lane highways (US 2 across all of Montana). The oil change for the Rabbit made stopping in Rapid City a requirement, but also let me see all the parks around there. But I was still planning on going to Sault Ste. Marie via Bemidji. I was going to miss the faerie gathering, and maybe get home on Tuesday instead of Monday, but so be it.

So I drove north to Fargo, where I stopped at another nice local coffee shop, wrote blog entries, and had a great conversation with the staff guy there who will for me be the image of a Fargonian. Then I headed to Bemidji, via Itasca State Park (headwaters of the Mississippi). Northern Minnesota is a lot like Vermont -- the hills are smaller, and there are more lakes and swamps, but there's a lot of greenery.

Just five miles before I got to Bemidji, the GPS odometer (which is the only mileage continuity between the two cars I've used on this trip) rolled over ten thousand. Ten thousand miles I've traveled! More, actually, since I didn't reset the trip meter on the GPS until I had been driving in Vermont about an hour. At the time, my OCD self felt it was a big letdown that it wasn't going to be perfect, but the miles I missed account for less than 1% of the total miles of the trip, so I got over it.

I got the picture I wanted. In the process I learned that Bemidji is another big BNSF railway town, since I saw and heard (mostly heard) the freight trains constantly in the brief time I was there.

I need to mention something else -- apparently Bemidji is the curling capital of the USA. I bet you didn't know that. Don't know what curling is? Think shuffleboard on ice. It seems to be a sport invented for ... insane purposes.

I then drove to Duluth, which is about a day's drive away from Sault Ste. Marie. I got there around 10pm and started looking for hotel rooms. Damn, it's Labor Day Weekend! I wasn't going to be traveling now! I was going to be camping in upstate New York! Indeed, very few hotel rooms were to be found. I found one online, booked it, and headed to the AmericInn (in Proctor, just south of Duluth).

When I got there, the front desk guy panicked. They were full. The reservation system had messed up. But wait, he had a duplicate reservation where someone had canceled one of the rooms, but not the other. He called the potential guests to see if they were coming; they weren't. I got a room!

But ... now I was wondering what the trip through Canada was going to be like -- would I be able to find places to stay? I wasn't going to be on major highways with rest areas to crash at. I'm also getting really tired of non-Interstate highway driving (Fargo to Bemidji, and parts all the way to Duluth, for example). It was going to take me three more days to get home. Maybe I should just give up and go the Chicago route that I had been avoiding because I didn't want to be in non-stop city for days. I don't know.

I turned my computer on and went online and made some friends in St. Paul, two hours away. I could stay there as long as I wanted. I headed to St. Paul, hotel room wasted (sorry), and met David and Josh. Chicago is six hours away. I can be home in two days, Monday night or Tuesday morning. I really want to be home. I mean, when I left Glacier, I thought about how close San Francisco or Vancouver were, and entertained the idea of driving back. But now I was so far east that home really is the only option. I think I may even be missing it some, actually. (How's that for an indefinite admission?).

Custer, SD to Brookings, SD

Day 39: Fri 29 Aug: A screaming comes across the plains.

I woke up, and checked out. Well, I didn't really check out because there was no one there. I just left my key in the box and left.

I drove to Jewel Cave National Monument, and took the "Scenic Tour". There are elevators down into the cave. It was pretty cool. This cave is either the second or third longest explored system in the world (Mammath Caves being the first). The cave walls are covered in calcite crystals, with some draperies and flowstones. The colors came out a lot better with the flash on the camera than it looked in person. Some of the rooms are enormous -- large enough to fit the entire Visitors Center; one large enough to contain the parking lot. Unfortunately those huge rooms are accessible only via extremely tight passageways, so we didn't see them.

They also offer (like Mammoth Caves) spelunking tours, for the adventurous and non-claustrophobic. In the Visitors Center there's a small tunnel you have to be able to crawl through in order to be able to take the tour -- so you don't get stuck while you're underground.

Then I drove around Custer State Park. The whole area is awash in publicity for National Treasure: Book of Secrets, including the afore linked web site.

But, as you can see from the picture, there's a lot of bare granite poking up, and the parts that aren't bare are covered in ponderosa pine. It's pretty, and interesting (there's a bison herd and pronghorn antelope), but it's not the Rockies.

After driving the "Wildlife Loop" and not seeing any bison (I saw one beside the road elsewhere in the park), traveling behind slow cars, I realized I didn't have a whole lot of time before my 3:30pm appointment at the VW dealer.

I headed off to Crazy Horse Memorial, watched the orientation movie, and then had to leave for Rapid City. I wish I could have stayed there longer.

The oil change was uneventful -- the staff were really friendly. They recommended a locally-owned coffee joint with wifi, which turns out to be a midwest franchise chain (Dunn Brothers Coffee), but they were friendly and had public terminals where I researched my trip to the Badlands. It appears the Visitors Center closes at 5pm this time of year (it was after 5pm). I wasn't sure if the park was open or not, but figured I check and see when I drove by.

There are multiple entrances. I headed to the northeastern entrance, furthest away from Rapid City, but closest to the highway in case it was closed. It wasn't! They have campgrounds and stuff there so, like the other big parks I went to, at some (late) point the gate staff go home, but the park is always open. I drove from east to west, at sunset, through the park. It was beautiful.

The badlands at Petrified Forest National Park are more colorful, but these are interesting in that grass is often growing on the flat tops. There are two levels of grassland, one high, and one low, and the badlands are the transition between the two levels.

It really was beautiful. I found a good spot to watch the sunset, and discovered a setting on the camera that was better for photographing sunsets than the "sunset" setting (which adds a red filter and gives it colors it didn't really have in person). Unfortunately the sun had actually set by then, but I did get some great pictures of the wispy clouds in the sky.

The picture to the left was taken with the red, sunset, filter in place.

I had only just started driving by sunset. I had a lot of plains to cross. I drove across all of South Dakota (to Sioux Falls), and up a bit of the east side before stopping for the night at a motel in Brookings, SD (at 4am). I was exhausted.

Billings, MT to Custer, SD

Day 38: Thu 28 Aug: The high plains go on and on...

Last night, before sleep, I realized that in the next day or two I was going to hit 5,000 miles on the Rabbit, which was oil change time. Since it was new, I wanted to take it to a VW dealer (silly, in hindsight). Well, the VW dealers nearest to my estimated 5,000 mile point were in Rapid City, SD; Sioux Falls, SD; and Fargo, ND. Actually, those are all the VW dealers in the northern plains. Vermont has more VW dealers than both the Dakotas, combined.

I had thought about catching I-94 to Fargo, but 5,000 miles was closer to Rapid City. Also, there are a lot of national parks near Rapid City, so I called the dealership and they had an opening on Friday afternoon. That meant I'd be spending Thursday night there and would have time to visit some of the parks. Cool.

The drive on I-90 from Billings, MT down into northeastern Wyoming and then southwestern South Dakota was a lot of brown hilly grasslands. It was very uneventful. There were some pretty steep hills along the route though.

I visited Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, which, most interestingly for me, recounted the history of the conflict between the US government and the plains Indians in the 1870s.

I went to Devils Tower National Monument. It's very cool. It was gong-show busy (I like Brian's term for very crowded tourist attractions). I did the loop around the tower, which was pretty. You can free-climb the tower, with a permit. I saw some people doing it.

There was also a prairie dog village in the park. Man, are they cute! I could watch them all day. Even better than chickens. They interact with each other, are curious, kiss and tussle and play, and generally act like little dogs while the graze the grass.

From there, I headed on towards Rapid City.

I visited Mount Rushmore National Monument just before sunset. It's pretty, but also gong show busy. And it's the definition of a patriotism park. The granite plaza leading up to the base of the monument and the arena for presentations was a bit over the top.

It was here I started learning more about the geology of the region. The Black Hills of South Dakota are an interesting granite outcrop in an otherwise vast, flat, expanse of sedimentary rock. All the peoples who have come across it have treated it specially. After hundreds and hundreds of miles of flat grassland, coming across a Ponderosa Pine forest must have been a treat. And sculptors like to carve things out of the hills.

Keystone is the town at the center of the Mount Rushmore tourist business and it was so crazy I swore I wouldn't stay there. A park ranger at Devils Tower had recommended that I go to either Jewel Cave or Wind Cave (both caves with interesting formations), but if I had time for only one, that Jewel Cave was prettier. So I ended up staying in Custer, not too far from Jewel Cave. It's the off season now and you can pretty much stay at any hotel for under $50. I found one I liked, a mom and pop rustic-style motel with really large rooms and checked in.

My plan for tomorrow is to get up early enough to do a tour at Jewel Cave, and then Crazy Horse, go to my oil change at 3:30pm in Rapid City, and then head to the Badlands. I'm a bit concerned about when the Badlands are open, since the web site implies that they close at 5pm, and I'm not sure if I'll make it or not, but I'll try.

I stay up too late reading, and then fall right asleep.

Polebridge, MT to Billings, MT

Day 37: Wed 27 Aug: Montana goes on, and on.

I woke up, broke camp, and then spent some time just sitting at the edge of Bowman Lake, in the quiet. Mist was rolling in from part of the shore, and then a small breeze would blow it back to shore. Back and forth.

A family of loons was in the lake (I assume -- two large birds and one small one who spent a lot of time between the two) and made those eerie sounds loons make.

It was enchanting. I had debated taking a hike -- there were several starting from the lake, ranging from easy to difficult -- but it was so clouded in, and sprinkling, that I decided I'd be better off going to going to Polebridge Mercantile (the only thing in Polebridge -- it's at a bend in the road, and there are no houses anywhere). On the way in yesterday evening, I saw a sign saying (miraculously) that they had wifi. I say miraculously because this is as remote as I've ever seen a store be.

They did, and the place was hopping. It's the dropping off point for all sorts of expeditions and locals, in addition to being a bakery with delicious breakfast sandwiches and sweet rolls. I hung out there for two hours writing blog entries and talking to people.

Two guys came through, visiting from Spokane, who were looking to go to Bowman Lake and were waiting for the weather to get nicer. We talked about routes across Montana. One of them is from the bay area, the other used to live on Plattsburgh Air Force Base! We reminisced for a while and generally had a good time gabbing over coffee. They said that the weather was so bad at Logan Pass that they closed the road! Snow and low visibility. Wow. The weather (here) got (slightly) better, and they headed off. My battery wore down; I didn't want to plug in the spares I had; and the store doesn't have power outlets available. So I called it quits, and decided to head on.

Here's a great picture of the burnt out forest and some of the miles of almost mud season road I had to drive on to get into and out of Polebridge.

I drove back to the Apgar Visitors Center to confirm that, and talk to more people about routes across Montana. I wanted to cross at Sault Ste. Marie, which would have made US 2 the easy way across, but it's two lanes all the way across Montana, and only becomes four, or divided, in North Dakota. After the Alberta experience I wasn't so sure I wanted to be on a two lane highway for that long. I ended up heading south, on the east shore of Flathead Lake (beautiful) to get to I-90.

While driving, I placed some calls to folks who might have suggestions (including a former Montanan), but came up for nought. I ended up side-tripping to Helena to see said former Montanans former hometown and workplace. What a beautiful place Helena is in, and such a pretty town. I hung out there for a while, actually, chatting with folks at the Myrna Loy Center and having dinner at a place the box office guy recommended. I should have taken into account that he was only just going to college, and would send me to cheap chain restaurants. Oh well. The food at Perkins was good and the staff friendly, and it was right at the exit I needed to get on to.

I drove and drove and drove. Eventually I got to a rest area outside of Billings, MT, where I decided to call it a night.

Banff, AB to Polebridge, MT

Day 36: Tue 26 Aug: Out of the Rockies and back into them again.

It was pouring rain when I left Banff. I had gotten some information on a scenic route to Waterton Lakes National Park from a ranger at Yoho National Park -- she mentioned Kananaskis Country, and gave me routes to drive through it. Basically, it's more of the Rockies. The rain eventually changed to slush (in August!) as I drove over Highwood Pass. It was there that I could see that the snow line was only a little higher than the road.

Once I got down out of the Rockies, I was on the high plains of Alberta, with the Rockies, covered in clouds, constantly to my right. It cleared up over the plains, but the mountains were still shrouded in clouds and mist.

I saw some large wind farms in Alberta, which was cool.

I had a near-fatal mishap, that was terrifyingly stupid. The road (Alberta-22) is two lanes, mostly straight, flat, and has a high speed limit. I was attempting to pass a dump truck filled with dirt (that had already dinged my windshield), in a passing zone, on a curve, on a hill, and I didn't have enough power (or he sped up going down the hill) as an RV came over the top of the hill coming the other way, down the hill towards me. Stupidly, and for unknown reasons, I did not slow down and pull back behind the dump truck. I tried to speed past it. I really don't know who was in control of my brain; certainly not the person who usually is. The near fatal mishap was the three of us passing each other -- the RV way over on their side of the road, the dump truck way over on our side, and me in the middle. Afterwards, I did brake and pull behind the dump truck, and slowed down to just below the speed limit, and let him get far ahead of me. I'm not sure, but I don't think I've passed another car on a two-lane road since (I'm writing this three days, and thousand(s) of miles, later.). Stupid stupid stupid. I'm very glad no one was hurt, the RV was fine in my rear view (didn't go off the highway), and no one stopped. I was afraid that the trucker would call it in or something and the Alberta police would be after me, which, frankly, I deserved. It was stupid and I have no explanation for it.

It took quite a while for the adrenalin to go away, and as a result, I don't have many pictures of what was incredibly beautiful Alberta foothills and sky.

I entered Waterton Lakes National Park, went to the Visitors Centre, and realized that Waterton Lakes is not, really, a mountain park. It's more the lakes in the foothills park. The US side is where the huge mountains are. So I turned around to head to the nearest border crossing.

Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park is interesting in that there are no border crossings within the park. There are also no roads that cross the border in the park. There are hiking trails that cross the international border, but none of them end up in a different country than the one you started in.

Aside from the US border guards wondering where my temporary plates were (California tapes a folded temporary registration to the lower passenger side of the windshield), I was back into the US with no hassles.

And thence to Glacier. Wow. Another mountain park. And it's pretty. And cold. And windy. It turns out there's a significant weather difference between the two sides of the continental divide. I entered the park on the east side, where it was dry and windy. I went up over Logan Pass, where it was very windy and in the 40s. The wind tore the car door out of my grip and slammed it into the next car's side view mirror. No damage to the other car. Mine now has a not insignificant ding (which, since I bottomed out on a speed bump in Jasper, and dinged the windshield from the dump truck, pretty much completes the break-in process on this vehicle. It's no longer new; it's mine.).

Coming down the west side, it's wetter -- temperate rain forest again, with lichen dangling down from the trees and lots of lush green.

The second of these Glacier Park pictures was taken from near the top of the pass, looking down onto one of the U-shaped glacial valleys below. It was beautiful, but too cold and windy to hang out for long.

I decided on the trip down the west side that I wanted to camp in as remote a location as possible, that I could drive to (since I don't have backpacking-style gear). That meant either Bowman Lake or Kintla Lake campgrounds. After taking the 15 mile dirt logging road to Polebridge that was required to get to either of them, I decided I'd had enough of dirt roads where 30mph was going too fast. So it was Bowman Lake, which was about 14 miles less of dirt road.

It was beautiful. I got there after the sun had set, but set up my tent and walked to the lake and just watched it disappear into the dark and mist. I think there were only about six other people at the campground. It was exactly what I had wanted.

I ate dinner (leftovers from the Safeway in Banff), and read some, and went to bed.

Lake Louise, AB to Banff, AB

Day 35: Mon 25 Aug: I wish it would stop being beautiful so I could take some time to eat and sleep.

I woke up this morning not very rested. I didn't sleep very well on the top bunk, mostly because the room was too warm. I had breakfast at the restaurant associated with the hostel, which had had good food the night before, and had a really good breakfast. Irwin joined me and he talked about working the rigs (oil) in Alberta and how he's just got a job working at one of the resorts in Jasper Park (Tum ti Jaw, or something like that -- I drove by it enough times. It's in a beautiful spot, at the foot of Bow Glacier).

After breakfast, I headed off to the Icefields Centre.

It had rained the night before, which made me glad that I hadn't camped. And it was still sprinkling. And, just because the place wasn't beautiful enough already, there was a rainbow. A rainbow that continued most of the way up Hwy 93. Like the rainbow south of Big Sur, everyone was stopping to take pictures of it. I was no exception. I have dozens of photographs of it, but here's one to give you a taste. It was reflected off the smooth, still, turquoise lake.

Then it was off to the Icefields Centre. In the end, because of the crappy weather, I decided I wouldn't take one of the tours. I had already been on a glacier (at Mount Edith Cavell) and it was getting late in the day (noon) and I really wanted to go for a hike. So I snapped some photographs and talked to a ranger about the Parker Ridge hike.

The Athabaska Glacier is impressive. This is the view from the parking lot at the Icefields Centre.

Hidden beyond that terminal moraine is the rubble field filled with people looking at the glacier. If you look closely at the left, you can see a line of buses riding out onto the ice.

Just a short drive south of the Centre is the pullout for the Parker Ridge trail. I just needed to share this large sign that was at the trailhead.

No, I won't touch any unexploded ordnance, thank you very much.

These are the mortars that they shoot off to set off preventive avalanches.

Although I'd been at a lot of pullouts and trailheads, and had seen literally hundreds of "avalanche zone, do not stop" signs on the highway, this was the first time I saw a sign like this. At first I thought it was a reference to unexploded ordnance from an battle!

This hike was short, but then again, it was 250m of elevation change in a 1.5km hike. This, as it turns out, was the same exact slope of my 6km hike with a 1000m elevation change. Oh well, at least it was shorter.

The weather started getting nice just as I started the hike. The sun poked out for a bit, and it stopped raining.

Some women who had hiked ahead of me snapped this photo for me. That's the Saskatchewan Glacier (which is the origin of the Saskatchewan River) in the background. The trail continued on down the ridge (downstream from the glacier) quite a ways. I followed it for a while, since it was mostly level (going downhill is what was killing my knee; level ground was fine). I stopped in a couple places and just sat and enjoyed the view.

Eventually the weather turned and it got really windy and cold. The wind coming down off the icefield is fierce, and cold. I laid down behind some stunted spruce groves and just watched the sky and the hill. Unfortunately there was no place out of the wind in which I had a view of the glacier, since that's where the wind was coming from.

Oh, I wanted to point out the rocks. They all looked like they had fossil shells, or worm tunnels, in them. The circles were about the size of a dime.

I probably spent a couple hours just hanging out at the top of the ridge. Once I got down, it really started raining. I changed clothes (my motorcycle rainsuit does a good job of keeping the rain off, but not such a good job of letting sweat ventilate out) and shoes, and decided that I'd had my peak experience(s) and that I should start heading south.

They were doing a lot of construction on the Trans-Canada Highway to turn more of it into a caribou- and deer-proof four lane divided highway. The cool thing I noticed are the wildlife bridges! The road goes through underpasses (they look like tunnels made of quonset huts filled over with earth) that have forest above them, so that wildlife can get across the highway. It was pretty cool. I'd never seen anything like that before.

I drove to the town of Banff, which looks like a much bigger version of Jasper designed by the combined marketing departments of Eddie Bauer and L. L. Bean. All the buildings on the main drag were designed to look cabin-y. Even the Louis Vuitton store. I know the city is supposed to be beautiful, and I could make out hints of the mountains surrounding it, but it was very misty, cloudy, and rainy, so it wasn't that beautiful.

I found a cheap hotel, went to Safeway to pick up prepared food (too much, as it turns out, but it keeps) for dinner, wrote up some blog entries and went to bed.

Jasper, AB to Lake Louise, AB

Day 34: Sun 24 Aug: I really can't believe it. It's all so stunning.

Today my plan was to work my way down 93 (the Icefields Parkway), taking side trips and time to see things. It was incredible. The first roadside stop I made was just a beautiful lookout over a small lake, but along a hillside that had recently burned. I thought it looked pretty, so I wanted to share the picture. For some reason the dead standing trees with the young grassland (or sometimes a young forest) beneath it looks exceptionally pretty to me.

I would see a fair number of landscapes like this, along with roadside pullouts with educational materials explaining the importance of fire to this ecosystem. It wasn't anything we hadn't heard before, but it was interesting to read about their plans for controlled burns on a regular basis.

I first took a side road to go up to Medicine Lake. It's a switchback up a steep, narrow, hanging valley (I was familiar with the concept of these from previous hikes in the Rockies). More pretty, stunning, views of mountains and forests.

Medicine Lake, however, was surprising. It looked like a turquoise blue, partially drained, reservoir. Then I read the information signs.

This lake has no outlet, and yet, every summer, it drains so low that the northern end is mostly just mudflats.

It turns out that the rock below the lake is fractured, and it drains out the bottom! Only in the summer when there's not enough rain or snowmelt to keep it full does it really drain.

Then it was off to Mount Edith Cavell. It was a long twisty road, with a snow-capped mountain in the distance that turned out to be the mountain the road took me to. With Angel Glacier on it, and its remains at the base, including a (turquoise) lake, with small icebergs in it.

There's a huge pile of boulders at the base of the glacier -- moraines. The landscape is really so fractal here that it's hard to judge distances. There are boulders of every size, so it's hard to tell if that's a man-sized rock quite a distance away, or a small rock closer in. It's made even more difficult by the spruce trees repopulating the moraine (since the glacier is retreating, that gives a place for trees to grow where they hadn't been able to, previously). They kind of look the same, regardless of scale -- again, is this a waist-high tree close by, or a 20 foot high tree in the distance? It's hard to tell.

Climbing on all the rocks, it was easy to misjudge distance and get too high or too far away from where you wanted to go. There really was no sense of scale. I was a giant and a fly, at the same time.

On/in the glacier at the base, there were a couple of large ice holes (cave-ins from above that created a tunnel from the top to the stones at the base) and a cave at the base.

There was a breeze of cold air coming out of this cave, and you could hear rushing water deep within the cave. I guessed that the cave went all the way back to the base of the cliff where the waterfalls were. I walked in to take pictures, but couldn't go very far because I had left my flashlight in the car. I thought about hiking back to the parking lot to get it, but decided that it was stupid enough of me to consider going into the treacherous ice cave alone. I saw a more prepared couple go in together (and later, come out), but I decided the wise thing to do was not to explore.

On the walk back to the car I met a couple who had seen me go in, and were glad to see that I had made it out. We joked about how easily I could have become famous, like that child who fell into the crevasse: "A man was killed in 2008 walking into an ice cave. Don't let this happen to you!".

The day went on -- I stopped at a spot where two rivers, of different shades of milky green, merged. I stopped at Athabasca Falls, which were kind of slightly larger version of Huntington Gorge, made extremely accessible to literally b'zillions of tourists.

I travelled further south. Every turn had another incredibly spectacular view. I stopped a lot. I took a lot of pictures. I soaked up the majesty. It was never-ending.

At a spot just north of the Icefields Centre I stopped at a pullout to capture this view. At the pullout were a couple of hikers who were trying to hitchhike back to their car. It took a moment for us all to realize that my French was actually much better than their English. André and Mimi from near Ottawa -- it was also their first time at the park and after I moved a lot of stuff around I was able to fit them in my car. We then shared exclamations and superlatives about how wonderful this park was.

When I mentioned that my legs were still sore from the hike I did at Glacier, they told me about a short hike that gave the best view of any they'd been on -- the Parker Ridge Trail, just south of the Icefields Centre, which goes up a ridge to give a spectacular view of Saskatchewan Glacier. I decided to try and do it tomorrow.

After dropping them off, I headed to the Icefields Centre, which I hadn't been to yet. I toured the museum to learn more about the Columbia Icefields, and glaciers in general. The ranger station had closed, but I got information about ice tours (where they take you on a big-treaded bus up onto the Athabaska Glacier) and decided to try and do one of them first thing in the morning.

And then it was time to figure out where I was going to spend the night. I headed down to Lake Louise Village, thinking it would be about the size of Jasper, when in fact it was quite tiny. I didn't feel like camping again (although it would have been much simpler if I had just left my tent up at Pocahontas). At the Visitors Centre they recommended a hotel (there are no cheap hotels in the parks), or a hostel. I decided to try the hostel.

I got a bed in a dorm room -- two bunk beds. I figured it would be nice to sleep in a bed, and to get a hot shower (yes, I said that -- I wanted a hot shower). I met two of my other roomies (Shawn from Australia, and Irwin from Calgary), and read until I was tired.

Illecillewaet Campground, BC to Jasper, AB

Day 33: Sat 23 Aug: And I thought yesterday was beautiful.

I broke camp and headed off to Jasper National Park. To get there, I drive through some incredible country. There's a lot of road glued onto the sides of mountains, and road traveling along river valleys with steep, steep, steep, mountains on both sides of you.

Kicking Horse Country, I believe some of it is called.

I entered Yoho National Park (home of the Burgess Shale) and stopped at the Visitors Centre there because it was so beautiful (the town of Field sits at the bottom of the Kicking Horse River valley) and to get some ideas on where to stay for the next couple days. It was there I decided I would stay at the Pocahontas Campground at the north edge of Jasper National Park tonight, and work my way south from there. That campground would be the furthest north I've been in North America (so far).

Plans made, I took some pictures. I knew that the strange colors of the rivers were due to rock flour from glacial melt. In cooler seasons, when the glaciers aren't melting, they run clear, but this time of year, they all have a milky green color that if you saw it in Vermont you wouldn't want to touch the water. I would see a lot of different shades of milky green and turqoise over the next several days.

I got off the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway 1) just north of Lake Louise and headed north on 93. And as soon as I did so, I saw ... glaciers. Lots of them. The mountains on the west side of the road are covered in them. I was stopping at every pullout to look more closely and take pictures. And the lakes! They are all an incredible turquoise color. It's strange and beautiful. Eventually it would stop being strange and become pretty normal since I didn't see another non-turquoise lake for days.

And then I got to the Columbia Icefields Centre. I couldn't believe it! There's a glacier that comes down to the road! You can hike to the lip of the glacier, and people were climbing all over it (heedless of the warnings about how as recently as a couple years ago, a kid died after falling into a crevasse at the lip). The glacier doesn't actually come down to the road any more -- it did earlier this century, but they are all retreating, and it's a short hike to it now. But it's there. You can see it from the road. Even with my (very) sore legs, I hiked over the terminal moraine (several of them) to get to the lip to see it. It's the Athabasca Glacier, the source of the Athabasca River, whose waters eventually drain into the Arctic Ocean.

Incredible.

I kept driving, and stopping, and looking. There are large stretches of forest recovering from fires; and large stretches infested with Pine Bark Beetle. The Pine Bark Beetle is a natural part of the ecosystem, and only affects weakened and old trees. Unfortunately, due to decades of fire suppression (a policy since reversed), most of the forests are very old. Also, it is more usually found further south, since it is kept in check by severe winters, but climate change has extended its range further north.

I made it to the town of Jasper, which is a railway town turned tourist destination. It had a fun, funky, feel, with a huge mix of visitors (from backpackers to high end tourists, locals and far-flung foreign itinerant summer labor). I ate dinner there at a Korean place, and then headed even further north to the campground. There are some hot springs just 15km from the campground, but they are fully-developed, and hanging out in a bathing suit in a hot swimming pool with a lot of people (Gong Show, Brian and his friends called it) would have been a let-down after the great hot spring experiences of a couple days ago. So I didn't go. I set up my tent, and crashed.

Illecillewaet Glacier, BC

Day 32: Fri 22 Aug: Oh My Effing God.

Today I hiked the Perley Rock trail to the edge of the Illecillewaet Glacier. I knew it was going to be a bit above me (it's rated "most difficult"), but I figured if I allowed enough time, I'd be fine.

Perley Rock is the third hump from the right in the above photograph. I ended up hiking not to its top, but behind it, to the glacier.

The first thing I should say is that when everything is in meters and kilometers, it all seems so much more doable than it does when you convert it to feet and miles. The trail starts at Illecillewaet Campground, which is at 1,200m. Twelve hundred meters doesn't seem so high, but it's about 4,000 feet, which is high enough to feel. The trail goes for 5.6km (3.5 miles), and you come back the same way, so 7 miles total. And you top out at (get ready) 2,400m (about 8,000 feet). My sea-level lungs were challenged, needless to say. As was every muscle in my body from my hips on down.

For the steeper portions near the top (probably about a third of the trail), all I did was count 100 steps, and stop and rest until I caught my breath. Sometimes I could only go 50 steps. Whatever I could manage. Pacing myself wasn't helping; it didn't really matter how slowly I took my steps, I would still need a rest to catch my breath. It was also made more difficult by the will-breaking magnitude of some of the peaks I was under. I couldn't really tell where the trail was going, except up, and some of the peaks I was under were so enormous that I didn't think I would be able to get to the top. It helped when some hikers coming down said I was only an hour away. An hour? The way I felt I should have been there already.

The trail got a bit confusing when it went over snow. The trail ended at a snowfield that had some very old footprints in it, but no fresh ones. I knew there were people ahead of me, so they must have gone somewhere, but it took me a while to figure it out. I wandered around following footprints (scrapes, really) in the muddy scree for a while. It turns out that they had gone above the snowfield to the base of the cliff it started at and hiked the narrow gap there.

But it was worth it. Oh man, it was so worth it. The view going up was intense, but going up over the last ridge there was the vast expanse of glacier in front of me, including some meltponds and a lake. Incredible. There was a family at the top, and they took a picture of me against the icefields, one of the few pictures on this trip with me in it. I need to learn how to use the face auto-detect mode of the camera at some point. I was just in awe, in every direction, but mostly to the glacier side, since I'd been staring at incredible mountain vistas the whole way up.

The white icefield (Illecillewaet Névé) beyond the glacier just goes on for miles. And it goes up several hundred more meters.

The weather was perfect -- mostly sunny. It started to turn more to cloudy, which made me find a wind-sheltered place to hang out, lay down, and stare up at the sky. Eventually I needed to head back down, since my plan was to be off the mountain by 5pm.

The trip down was fast, but grueling. My right knee was really feeling it, as were the soles of my feet. I didn't have the best footwear. I need to remember that when I go hiking, I should wear my thick polypro socks with these boots, because otherwise my feet slide around too much. The toe that I had smashed in SF actually did fine. It's still a bit sore if I stub or jam it, but I've got no problems pushing off with it.

In this picture looking down, you can see the Asulkan Brook. I'm not sure where this particular stream ends up, but I know I'm close to the headwaters of the Columbia River. Rivers from the mountain parks flow to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans. Way off in the distance, down at the bottom, you can see a stretch of Highway 1. It was a long way down, and I took this picture when I was already about a third of the way down.

I finally made it back to the campground, where I decided that my aching feet would be better served by spending the night here than driving anywhere. When I checked in, they asked for where I was from, and when I said Vermont, the campground attendant said he was from Montréal, and loved skiing at Jay Peak -- that is, until he took a job at Banff. We all agree that once you've skiied the West, there's no going back to the East.

I set up my too-huge tent (we've fit two queen-sized air mattresses and four people in this tent), and sat down and wrote this. I'm going to sign off, read a bit, and then go to bed.

I say that, but it's 7pm, and the sun is setting against the mountains and the clouds and mountains look incredible. Man, can it get any more beautiful?

Nakusp, BC to Rogers Pass, BC

Day 31: Thu 21 Aug: I enter the Mountain Parks.

I woke up very late this morning. We had breakfast mostly-in-bed as Sean took our various snack-y purchases and combined them into makeshift sandwiches of cheese and sausage. We all ended up napping after breakfast, after which Brian and I got up and hot spring'd again. Check out time arrived sooner than we were ready for, and we quickly packed. I should have taken a picture of the inside of the cabin -- with the sofa bed out, and the other bed, we couldn't open the door all the way. It was the definition of cozy with all four of us in there.

Last night I noticed on a map, and Brian confirmed, that we were a long ways from Nelson, and very close to my next destination. Since I had all my stuff with me, Brian offered to catch a ride back home with Sean and Melissa, so I could just continue on. We said our goodbyes and headed out.

It was still rainy/misty/cloudy, but I got some better pictures of the lake and headed off.

These lakes are miles and miles long, and very narrow. Many of them have free ferries across them, and this one is no different. In fact, the highway ends at the ferry dock, and picks up again across the lake.

The scenery here is incredible. I keep saying that, but it continues to be true. Some of these lakes remind me of the Vermont road that goes by Greensboro. They have steep mountains and no beaches and sometimes lots of camps.

I drove to Revelstoke, BC. It is a Canadian Pacific Railway town (currently in the midst of Railroad Days) with a frigging intense beautiful mountain looking over the whole city. It's also a big lumber town -- the whole place smells like wood.

I forgot to mention that there are so many logging trucks and wood chip trucks on these highways that there is always tree bark in the road. You don't want to tailgate these guys.

I hung out in a bakery with wifi (Modern Bake Shop and Cafe) for a while planning my next step. Brian had mentioned that there was a hotel at the top of Rogers Pass (in Glacier Park) that I should stay at. I tried to find it online, but couldn't, but figured I would see it when I passed it. Glacier Park was only 30 minutes away.

I ended up finding it no problem. I checked out the Visitors Centre, bought my Canada National Parks Pass (since I plan on camping for several nights in Banff/Jasper, it was cheaper to buy an annual pass), bought some maps (including an intense wall-sized topo of the parks), and got some advice on a good day hike that would get me to a glacier. Then I watched Simpsons and South Park and went to sleep.

Nelson, BC to Nakusp, BC

Day 30: Wed 20 Aug: Hot springs!

I was actually crashing on a family visit of Brian's. His brother and sister-in-law were visiting from Brooklyn and had been touring around the area for a few days. The plan for today was to hang out, tour the area hot springs, and spend the night in a cabin with our own private hot spring. Since it was a misty, coudy, rainy day, it worked out perfectly.

Wow. First off, the driving was incredible. We went through South Slocan, Winlaw, Slocan, New Denver, and Nakusp. Most of these towns are lakeside, each lake just a gash in the mountains filled with water. And the mountains are steep. Brian kept pointing out that we couldn't even see the magnitude of the mountains -- the mist and clouds were hiding the even higher mountains behind and above the ones we were seeing.

As we passed through Winlaw, Brian briefed me on the marijuana economy of the area. "Probably one out of every three houses here (Winlaw) is a home-grower." I had already been told that you don't ask people what they do here, because they'll make stuff up. (I try not to do that anyway, because Miss Manners says you shouldn't.) That there are so many home-growers (who make a decent living without spending a lot of time doing it) means that there is a lot of volunteer labor for things like maintaining trails and hot springs and the arts, etc. The fact that the whole region is just so damn hard to get to means the people who live here all chose to live here, and so the place has a totally positive vibe. Anyhow, just an aside.

We bought some food, met up with Brian's brother and sister-in-law and went to St. Leon Hot Springs. That name makes it sound like a place you could find on a map, but actually it's a hot spring on a hillside above the St. Leon Creek that you get to by logging road (Google Maps has it as St. Leon Creek Rd), parking, and then hiking down a substantial hillside under cedars, fir, and spruce.

It was beautiful. We all agreed that what Vermont is really missing is a good hot spring in the woods.

This hot spring was a network of plastic pipes stuck into seeps on the hillside draining into pools made of rock and cement. You could juggle the pipes around to try and get a reasonable temperature. The main pool was hot tub (104º) temperature. There was a hotter one that I didn't go into. It was raining through the trees, and cloudy, and other people came and went in two, threes, and fives. It was wonderful. We were there, in the sulfurous water, for four hours.

From there we trekked to dinner. The nearest food was at Halcyon Hot Springs, a fully-developed hot spring resort. Not necessarily ideal (resort restaurant), but it was late, we were tired, and the other alternatives were quite a ways away. We ate at the restaurant with a view of the lake and their hot springs (which just looked like a series of hotel swimming pools) and were glad that we had done it the way we had.

After dinner, we drove to Coyote Hot Springs, a primitive hot springs resort. The four of us stayed in a cabin with a sofa bed, with a private pool filled with hot spring (sulfur, again) water. The pool was meant for lounging and sitting, not swimming, which was perfect. One half was about two feet deep and the other half about three or four feet deep. I took the picture to the right the next day, in daylight, as we were leaving. They had already drained the pool in preparation for the next guests.

Brian and I hung out in the water until quite late. We eventually crawled into our sleeping bags on the sofa bed and passed out.

Vancouver, BC to Nelson, BC

Day 29: Tue 19 Aug: Another day, another half dozen ecosystems.

Mario made a delicious breakfast to send me on my way. I'm sad that I couldn't stay longer, but look forward to my return. This trip has been more about breadth than depth, but I've now got a pretty good list of places I'd like to spend more extended time in.

Mario gave me a route out of town that would avoid late rush hour traffic. Remember what I said about there not being any freeways in Vancouver? I imagine it diversifies the routes people take to get to and from their work, since many different paths are mostly the same. His instructions worked great, and I didn't hit any traffic on my way out. I did have an incident when I shifted into the second rightmost lane on a bridge in preparation for getting off in two exits, only to discover that the right two lanes were exit-only. The taxi driver who I cut off (twice) seemed remarkably forgiving.

As Brian's brother and sister-in-law put it: "Canada: a kinder, gentler, United States."

I made my way down CA-1 along the Fraser Valley to Hope. It says something about the mountains I was coming upon that there was a huge, electronic, sign detailing which of the four major routes through the mountains were open.

It was cloudy and drizzly most of the way, which seemed odd, since the landscape looked very Californian: conifers and dead (oops, I mean golden) grass. It's not supposed to rain in August in California. Or Oregon. Or Washington (outside of the coastal rain forest). Or, as it turns out, central British Columbia. Everyone said it was weird.

The mountains here are steep. I mean, really steep. Like, just pushed up from the ocean floor and not enough time has passed for any significant erosion steep. Landslide steep. And indeed, I drove by a memorial for the Hope Slide. Let's just say that the road I drove on was 30 meters higher than the road I would have driven on before January 9, 1965. The picture to the left is of some of the rockfall from that slide.

As I would later learn from Brian, avalanches and landslides occur with amazingly lethal regularity. The highways I would drive on for the next several days all contained gates at irregular intervals to block traffic during avalanche remediation. It's very weird to be driving on a high-speed (although not divided) highway and pass through a railroad gate-arm with no railroad crossing.

I drove along a long stretch of the Similkameen River, which is the irrigation source for acres and acres of orchards. Cherries, peaches, apples, grapes, berries, you name it. Some of the twons I drove through were non-stop fruit-stand strip-malls. The picture to the right is of the mountain above Keremeos, one of these orchard towns.

Gas prices in Canada have not gone up as much as in the US, and with the exchange rate the way it is, Canadian gasoline really isn't that much more expensive than that in the US.

I eventually made it to Nelson, to Brian's house. Nelson is a pretty crunchy, hippie, outdoorsy, town. It's very beautiful. It is on the south shore of the long, thin, west branch of Kootenay Lake. It seems like every town here has its own hydropower dam, advertised when you get into each town. Nelson as well. The mountainsides are steep, and although Nelson is laid out on a grid, that grid has some weirdnesses due to the steepness of the hill streets.

Brian's housemate Lauren (Loren?) let me in. Ollie (Brian's dog) remembered me (and probably will never forget the snowy night he managed to score a roast off of our grill). I quickly met a couple Shambala-ian drop-bys, including a guy from Montpelier, VT (one of several Montpelierites I would meet in Nelson) who runs The Vermont Hemp Trade Initiative. He's been traveling across Canada picking up hemp products to sell in California, and since I was coming from where he was going, and vice versa, we talked a bit about the must-sees and the can-skips.

The Shambalians eventually moved on. Another house guest (name forgotten) arrived from climbing in the Bugaboos. He's connected to everyone else at the house through NOLS, and had been doing some serious (to me) climbing. Brian eventually arrived home and we all had a delicious, vegan, rice-bowl dinner with great conversation.

It had been a long day, and bed was very welcome.

Vancouver, BC

Day 26: Sat 16 Aug through Day 28: Mon 18 Aug: Vancouver! Vancouver is a great city, and Mario a wonderful host.

I'm writing this almost a week later, and know I am leaving things out. Sorry.

On Saturday, Mario took me on a walking tour of Sunset Beach (I forgot my camera, so no pics, sorry. Look it up in Google Earth.), and also some barhopping. I got to meet some of his friends, and generally have a good time walking around and getting oriented.

At one of the bars I got into a very heated discussion about the US health care system with a German (I think) and a Bush refugee (American ex-pat, from Minneapolis, living in Seattle, marrying a Canadian). Even though they couldn't have been preaching to a more receptive choir, it didn't seem that they had any solutions other than leave. I mean, I know our health-care system as a heavy consumer, as an advocate for an even heavier consumer, as an employer who provides insurance to his employees, as an employee, and as a business who helps providers get paid from our totally brain-dead system. It just seemed to provide a way for everyone to do some bashing without thinking about it. I mean, really, how do you implement a single-payor system in a country where socialism is a dirty word? Anyhow, it was refreshing to get into a semi-intelligent political discussion in a gay bar.

One of the things that makes Vancouver special, as a large city, is that there are no downtown freeways. It's all surface streets. This makes it eminently walkable, and bicyclable. Just think of all the places you can't go in Boston, New York, San Francisco, because you can't cross the freeways, or don't want to be near them. Not so in Vancouver. There are crosswalks everywhere.

Oh, and bicyclists beware, the police enforce traffic laws on bicyclists. We saw a guy getting a ticket for riding on a city street without a helmet.

In the evening, we went to Stanley Park, the huge park at the northern edge of the peninsula. It's the large parks that make the cities, I've come to see. Balboa Park in San Diego, Central Park in NYC, The Common in Boston, Golden Gate Park in SF, and Stanley Park in Vancouver. They are each different, in terms of size, accessibility, separateness, etc, but they definitely lend and reflect the character of the cities they are in.

We arrived just in time for sunset, and what an incredible sunset it was. Everywhere you look in this city, there is ocean and mountains. It's great.

We took a nap, and then went clubbing at Club 816: The World. Good house music, with a local DJ, that lasted into the morning.

Sunday, we laid low, since we didn't get to bed until around 8am. We went to beer bust at Pumpjacks in the afternoon.

Monday, Mario worked in the morning, but was able to solve the Apache/ PHP/ SSL problem (well, the Apache/PHP part) that had been bothering him since Friday, and was able to take the afternoon off. I had woken up late, and then struggled with the wireless in his condo (it had been working flawlessly, but was suddenly unable to connect... It went on for over an hour before I just gave up, and by then it was so close to lunch time that I didn't want to leave to go exploring because I knew he was coming home for lunch), so it wasn't the greatest of mornings. That turned around when he got home.

We had a late breakfast, and then went for a walk around downtown Vancouver -- to the cruise ship dock, around the marinas, and back home. Vancouver is in the middle of a massive construction boom, partly because of the 2010 Winter Olympics, but only partly. Business is booming, and condo high-rises and office buildings are going up everywhere. The convention center by the cruise ship dock is in the middle of an intense renovation, and there are construction cranes everywhere.

Just in case you didn't know how long it was until the 2010 Winter Olympics, there's a sign in the city centre telling you.

Aberdeen, WA to Vancouver, BC

Day 25: Fri 15 Aug: twenty hours, twenty ecosystems. Oh, and beauty.

Woke up in the motel and did some real trip planning for this day. Originally I had planned on spending three nights at Olympic National Park, but I spent an extra day in SF, and an extra day in Portland (neither of which I regret), and wanted to be in Vancouver for the weekend. So I had a day to get from Aberdeen, to Hoh Rain Forest, to however it was I was going to get to Vancouver.

The drive was great; this was the first time I went through severely logged (clearcut) areas. It's very weird. Since they are, basically, farms, they face all the issues that farmers who plow do in losing their topsoil. I saw some farming in Oregon that seemed to have no care for the fact that they were kicking up dust clouds for miles. I don't know how much erosion occurs in some of those clear-cut slopes; unlike some other ecosystems I have driven through, there seems to be a very healthy amount of underbrush that might help in holding the soil together once it's become tree-less. It was a horror that old growth forest got cut down for this, but once that happens, it's the same as having plowed up the prairie.

Is there anywhere in Washington State where you do not have an incredible view of a glacier-topped mountain in the distance? Mt. St. Helens; Mt. Adams; Mt. Rainier; Mt. Olympus; Mount Baker; Glacier Peak?


Hoh Rain Forest was cool; but August is the dry season, and there were lots of tourists. I did a short hike and got some great moss pictures. The Sitka Spruce, which grows only in these coastal rain forests, gets particularly enormous here. That's my backpack at the base of the trunk.

Then the driving schedule set in. I had originally planned on taking the Port Angeles ferry to Victoria, and then another ferry from either Victoria or Nanaimo to Vancouver. When I invesigated the schedules, I was only going to be able to make the last Port Angeles ferry, and my brief glance at the other schedules made it appear that I wouldn't be able to get to Vancouver that evening. In a more intense look at the schedules, and also knowing what my real arrival time turned out to be (10pm, instead of, say 4pm), I probably could have made it totally via ferry.

So I raced for Port Townsend to catch the ferry there to another place in Washington from which I would be able to get on I-5N. On a sign approaching Port Townsend, it said to call 511 because reservations were required. Oops. I was not ready for that. I called, and they do have a limited number of standby's available, first-come first-served. They're running on only one ferry, at half-schedule, etc, so reservations were strongly requested. I missed making it onto the first ferry, but was the first standby onto the second.

Got on I-5N north of Seattle and south of Bellingham, and saw an incredible sunset. What I've finally realized is that these particular sunsets I comment on are not everyday events. The locals talk about them with reverence and awe. "This is the land of beautiful sunsets, but today's was prime."

They actually have signs on the highway telling you the border wait times at the various crossings, so I went off I-5 to save twenty minutes of waiting. They were, of course, surprised that I was visiting from Vermont, only had a vague knowledge of where I was going to go in Canada, and was driving a newly bought California car. So I got sent to immigration, which just ended up being them using my IDs to run a background check, and I was sent on my way. No search! That was nice.

I arrived at Mario's at around 10:30pm. I showered, got settled in, and dragged out for some Vancouver night life, which was fun. Mario lives on the 20th floor of a building with great views of the harbor/bay, and right walking or biking distance to everywhere. I can understand why he likes it here so much.

Portland, OR to Aberdeen, WA

Day 24: Thu 14 Aug: More beauty.

I woke up late, and hung out with Michael and Eric. Michael was getting packed to fly to Arcata for the weekend (where he used to live, and from whence I had just driven), while I did some route planning. Michael and Eric had recently gotten back from a two week visit to the northern Rockies, including Glacier National Park and Banff and Vancouver (all of which are on my itinerary), and Michael gave me some good tips on places to go in Glacier. Right around noon, I headed off.

Thank you guys! It was great seeing you again.

My plan was to get to Olympic National Park, or nearby, today. That plan got waylaid when I decided that I really shouldn't miss Mount St. Helens. I'm glad I went. It's a bit of an out-of-the-way drive, but the scenery is intense. It also ties together a lot of the stuff I've already seen in other parks: the Painted Desert and petrified logs in Petrified Forest National Park, the volcanic terrain in northern Arizona, etc. Here it all was, in one place, and it happened less than thirty years ago.

I went to the Johnston Ridge Observatory, on the north side of the mountain, which is the side that blew up (and out). The geology of the region is a result of the independent series of events that happened when the volcano erupted: the north side of the mountain collapsed in the largest landslide in recorded history; the release of the pressure of the mountain caused the underlying high-gas-content magma to explode, vertically, and laterally in a pyroclastic flow; the heat of the magmas melted all the snow and glaciers which then flooded downslope; finally there was the ashfall. At least, that's what I remember. And afterwards, the heat from the rock would sometimes boil the river or lake water it had buried, which would cause mini-explosions and craters up to a quarter-mile across.

I should point out that when you look at these pictures of the caldera, that before the eruption, Mount St. Helens had a pointy peak, like Mt. Hood. It's really dramatic in the before and ftare pictures, but from these pictures here, just imagine the cone of the mountain continuing up to a point. It's all gone, distributed across the surrounding landscape.

The Observatory has a great movie, and really informative exhibits. It was hard not to tear up when reading the first-person accounts of the people who lived through it, and hearing the last words of people who didn't live through it.

Thirty years later, parts of it still look like the moon. The blast knocked down trees, or, further away, seared them standing. That is in evidence all around the area. The colors were much like the Painted Desert, and for much the same reason, I imagine.

I didn't leave the park until about 6pm. There was no way I was going to make it to an Olympic National Park campground before they closed, so I decided to stop in the biggest town on the way there, which, on the map, looked like Aberdeen. So here I am. Aberdeen is a lumber town. Driving in to town, there's a lumber yard on the river that just goes on forever, with huge stacks of dimensional lumber.

I went online looking for cheap places to stay, was scared by some reviews, and ended up staying at "America's Best Value Inn". Sheesh, what a name. Since the mom and pop Mexican/Salvadorean restaurant across the street was already closed, I got dinner at Mazatlan, a more chain-y Mexican restaurant. I had the Tacos Al Carbon, which were really good.

Portland, OR

Day 23: Wed 13 Aug: Another beautiful day.

In my over-scheduled first four week plan of this trip, I was to leave San Francisco on Sunday, spend only one day in Portland, and three nights in Olympic National Park. I spent an extra day in SF, and, now, an extra day in Portland. Michael said, "Stay! Don't you want to go skinny dipping at Rooster Rock?". I'm glad I did.

East of Portland, off I-84, is Rooster Rock State Park. It's three miles of sandy beaches along the Columbia River, some of which are officially designated clothing optional. Michael called around, and a group of seven of us ended up caravanning there.

On the way there, I saw Mt. St. Helens to the north, and Mt. Hood to the east. With views like that, why would you want to live anywhere else?

The beach was beautiful. One the hike there, we picked blackberries, the Oregon state weed. The river was not too cold, the sun was hot, and the view immense. The Columbia River valley formed in a catastrophic event a million years ago called the Missoula Floods, and the geology of the region is striking. We had fun swimming and playing on the beach. There's a mile-long sand bar in the middle of the river that was too far for me to swim too, but the river was low enough that downstream you could walk onto it. "Sand bar" is a misnomer, because it is an island with deer, beaver, and a full-fledged forest on it. The downstream sandy section is a dune about fifty feet high. Xzom, Saguda, and I walked around the island. It was bigger than it looked. It was a classic "three hour tour". The upstream end of the island was blanketed by rushes and grasses. The rushes weren't so bad to walk through, but the grass nicked my legs enough that when we got back to beach, the cold water felt really good. By the time we got back, the sun had set (beautifully, in the west, in the downstream channel), everyone had packed up and was waiting for us on the beach. It was a fun adventure.

Even the locals said the day, and the sunset, were spectacular.

We headed off back to Portland for dinner at the Laughing Planet, which was really good. The outdoor seating in the back made for a good time.

Michael, Eric, and I headed back home, where we watched a little bit of the Olympics (synchronized men's diving!). I didn't last too long before I had to crash.