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.