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.