back - back - back in the USA

Whoa, I have been rather delinquent. I looked at the last part I wrote which was several days ago in Smithers. We have been putting on some miles while seeing things and quitting late in the day very tired. We have been talking about finding a place where we can take a few days off. I also need to figure out where I want to celebrate my birthday. 60 requires some effort. Tell you more when we figure it out.

We left Smithers and continued down the Yellowhead Highway. It was a long drive but the scenery gave us something to do so the miles melted away. The mileposts to Jasper kept going down and much progress was made (this is just a way to indicate that we put on a lot of miles and had nothing to report). Soon the Canadian Rockies began to show in the windshield. The Canadian Rockies are broken up into several parks, some national and some provincial. The first one we encountered was the Mt. Robson Provincial Park. Mt. Robson is one impressive rock. It is shaped like an old fashioned toaster, the one with the doors on either side. It is sheer rock up the 3 sides I saw. I don’t know about the back side. The top and sides are covered with ice and snow. It is a very popular climbing destination. My son, the mountain climber (he was on McKinley as we were driving up to Alaska) said that this mountain is on a very short list of mountains being considered for next year’s climb. I have seen Mt. Ranier and Mt. McKinley and have seen pictures of the Mexican and Bolivian climbs and while they were all much bigger than Robson, Robson could be the most difficult climb yet. I am sure he would disagree but this mountain is impressive.

We drove into Jasper from there. We saw this really impressive tram and drove up to it. Unfortunately, there was no room to park the beast. The parking lot was very small and tight and there already were some large motorhomes taking up some space we `could have used. Rather than drive around, we headed back down and went into the town of Jasper. We parked along the main street and spent the rest of the afternoon shopping. Jasper is a tourist town surrounded by huge mountains. It could be in Switzerland or Austria. We traveled back to the area of the tram to a large national park campground called Whistler’s. There were over 350 campsites so we didn’t have any trouble getting one but it was without electricity or water. That is ok; we can make up for it. Ooops, we didn’t read the rules and had to be spoken to about the generator. They had the strictest generator rules I have ever run in to. They allowed you 3 ½ hours a day (7 to 8:30 and 5 to 7). Even Denali with their Nazi like wilderness experience (keeping all the vehicles with generators in one place (protecting the rest of the world from them) and then not letting them use them. Campfires were not too much of an issue when it doesn’t get dark until after midnight. In the Canadian parks, you are charged $7.90 a day for a fire permit and then have to put out your fire at 11:00 to maintain quiet rules. If you pay for the permit up front and it rains, you get no refund or you can go up to the ranger station and buy one each day you want to have a fire. This means standing in line as there is a lot of turnover and a lot of new campers coming in each night. I was third in line with 2 lines going and took about 20 minutes. Not sour grapes, I deserved to be spoken to as I had not read the rules. The other rules seem strange though.

Off and running early the next morning. We were anxious to see the park. We headed into the park and soon realized that one of the biggies, Miette Canyon, was not in the park at all but further down the Yellowhead. We turned around and went out of the park and drove to the Canyon. This is a very deep very narrow fissure created by a flowing stream. There are several waterfalls and bridges across the canyon. There is a nice trail that winds down along the canyon. It is mostly in the trees and a nice walk. Bridge 3 has a waterfall and you can feel the spray on the bridge. Bridge 4 goes basically nowhere. You get a nice view of the lower part of the canyon from it but it is there to provide the ice climbers with a means across the canyon. There is a trickle of water there at the top of a sheer face of rock. In the winter this builds a great wall of ice that is a popular climbing spot. The lower section of the hike is a nice walk through the woods along the banks of the stream after it emerges from the canyon. Ok, now the fun, I didn’t mention just how much the drop was along the 4 ½ kilometers but now was the time to climb back up to bridge 2 where we started. Of course, nothing is easy, there is also a bridge 1 they didn’t tell us about. It follows the top section of the canyon from where it starts with a little stream dropping through a rocky area before plunging into the action portion of the ride. The top section dumps you into the Tea House (a poorly disguised effort to portray the gift shop as something classy like a Tea House). The Tea House was nothing more than a concession stand and the gift shop was the clutteriest place I have seen in a long time. You could hardly walk through it.

Back to the park. We went through the same lane we had gone through earlier and got the same girl checking our passes. She looked at us kind of funny and waved us through. We were now seriously on the Icefields Parkway. Soon we slowed down to see some mountain goats grazing next to the highway. They were pretty much the same color as the ground they were grazing on. They didn’t pay any attention to us so we took some pictures and moseyed on. The mountains and streams got more and more beautiful. We didn’t stop at every scenic spot but we could have (and we would still be there). Every turn brought new vistas and soon most of them were topped by snow pack and glaciers and the bottom of every glacier spawned a stream of the prettiest green water. Many of these streams gather together into a torrent and soon you have a river of green water. On the glacier, the melt is a bright blue. Once it collects below the glacier, it creates green streams which end up as grey rivers. Got it? There will be a test at the end. We saw cirque glaciers, hanging glaciers and alpine glaciers. Then we saw the Columbia Ice Fields. This is a mountain or series of mountains with one solid ice pack on the top that rolls off into several glaciers. There is an Ice Fields Interpretive Center. There was a lower parking lot near the toe of the Athabascan Glacier. It was steeply downhill and the parking lot itself was tiny. There were a couple of small motorhomes there but I didn’t think I wanted to go there. You could walk up to the toe (bottom edge of the glacier) and then up onto the glacier itself. We opted instead for the snow coach ride up onto the glacier itself. These snow coaches are bus like vehicles with big earth mover tires on them lifting them 6 feet off the ground. This company claims to be the only company to take people onto the glacier anywhere in the world. There are 33 of these vehicles in the world and this company (Brewster) owns 32 of them. The 33rd is owned by the US Government and is used in Antarctica to transport people from McMurdo Sound to the Airport and back (small bit of useless information which I only mention as I was the only one on the coach who analyzed the data and came up with the right answer). Once again, we played in the snow and enjoyed the rarified air on a large mountain (we were at the 7,000 foot level. The parking lot was 6,600 feet, an altitude my truck didn’t much appreciate.

Back at the camper, we discovered that we could camp overnight at the parking lot (for a fee of course) so we motored on in search of. After one false start (the campground was too small for us) we found a place to spend the night. We set up and walked up to register. When we returned, our neighbor was out in his site playing his bagpipes. I have to admit, that was something I had never run into before. It was pretty neat. We rose early as we wanted to finish the parks and get over the border before night. We soon passed from Jasper National Park into Banff National Park. This was more of the same and we checked it all out. We soon arrived in Lake Louise. We had heard that Lake Louise was not to be missed so we got off the parkway and headed into Lake Louise. There was a little town and then we arrived at the Chalet. We followed a bus through the traffic pattern with all the little cars peeling off to a car parking lot. The busses had their own lot and then came the RV lot. Like a group of second class citizens we moved into our lot. Always the furthest away from everything. We didn’t have to exercise much as we always had to walk a long ways to get anywhere from the RV lot. Lake Louise was a green lake in an area carved out of 3 mountains. You looked down the lake at 3 immense walls of stone above a green lake filled with red rented canoes (it would have been more interesting if they had been “red rented rowboats” or even “rusty red rented rowboats”. Off we went on or way toward Banff. We arrived in Banff and found that to visit the town we had to get off the main road so we passed and continued on saving that part for another trip. Calgary was our next target. As we approached Calgary, we entered the Canadian old west. We took route 2 toward the south and didn’t get to see much of Calgary up close. All down route 2 we could see the Rockies to our right in the distance. The trip was unexciting and eventually we arrived at the border. After a brief interrogation and a superficial search of the motorhome we were back in the good old US of A. We weren’t near any civilization but we were home. We drove a few miles and pulled into a KOA at St. Mary’s Montana for a well deserved rest. The campground was in a section that had been in the middle of a huge forest fire at the end of July, 2006. Our plan was to drive through the park’s northern road and head down to the southern part of the park and head for Bozeman for an attack on Yellowstone and Jackson.

Well, that plan didn’t work out. We pulled into the entrance and were told we couldn’t drive through the park. Due to the narrowness of the roads in the middle, we could drive in 11 miles and then turn around and come back out, drive all the way around the park and go in just 20 miles on the other end then turn around and come back out. We went in, turned around and left. We figured that we had seen enough mountains and glaciers anyway so we headed south into Montana. We drove through miles and miles of the forest fire area. Not much to see but burned trees. It was quite amazing to see what had burned and what had been spared. In some areas great huge areas had burned and an occasional patch had been spared. Soon we broke out of the hills and into the old west. Miles and miles of cattle ranches with hay fields spaced in between. You wouldn’t see anything but rangeland for miles and then a ranch. We drove through this for hours. Every hour to hour and a half we would find a small town with a gas station, a small store and a bar. The bars were dumpy weather-beaten buildings with neon signs in the windows. Then we drove through miles of stone outcroppings and hills with big rock formations sticking out of them. Beautiful but nothing like it anywhere on the east coast. We drove into the darkness and threw in the towel in a town called Pipestone at a little campground. In the morning, we looked over the map to see what route we would use. We were in a position to get to Bozeman, Mt in plenty of time to take the road down to the North Entrance of Yellowstone. Of course that didn’t happen. We found a route that went from the next exit down the highway and headed down to the West Entrance but went through 4 towns that had these little rickety building symbols on the map. After searching for the legend, we discovered that this symbol meant ghost town. Among the towns were Virginia City and Nevada City. This intrigued us enough to cast off our plans and head down towards a rendezvous with a couple of ghost towns.

We had a nice drive and eventually came to the first of the 4 towns. We couldn’t find any signs or indications of what made the towns ghost towns. We didn’t fare any better in the second town but we hit the jackpot in the third. Nevada City had been abandoned following their gold rush. A couple of people stayed there into the 20th century and began to collect buildings from other places around Montana and added them to the collection of buildings remaining at Nevada City. They eventually died off and the place has become a museum. Many of the buildings are furnished and the stores stocked. You can go into many of the buildings and look around at the inventories. There are some homes that are just as they were when people lived in them. There is a hotel there that you can stay in. The lobby is just as it was when it was open 100 years ago. Several movies and television westerns have been filmed in the buildings there including Little Big Man, Return to Lonesome Dove, Missouri Breaks and others. There were original Conestoga wagons, a sawmill and a building full of player pianos and other musical oddities.

Then we moved up the road to Virginia City. Virginia City was never completely turned into a ghost town even though the map said it was. The original buildings were there as were other buildings. It was an odd arrangement for a town. Several of the original buildings were museums and others were in use as stores. I did not find it effective and the commerce only cheapened the historical aspect of the town. We wandered around and had lunch there before hitting the road again. We passed through some beautiful country with large lakes and were soon on the doorstep of West Yellowstone, Montana. My cell phone rang. It was my son. It was the first incoming call we had received since leaving home. It was my son. He wanted to discuss the fall race tickets and to let us know he was flying up to the Canadian Rockies next weekend (Labor Day) to do some climbing. It was a last minute decision and he and his climbing buddy figured they would have 2 days to climb and the holiday to get home. We talked about some of the places we had seen and he told us about the places he had climbed when he was up here between Christmas and New Years. Since we realized we had cell coverage we pulled over the side of the road and made several phone calls (the coverage continued into the park. It was the first time we have had continued coverage since we left home in July). Soon we were passing into Yellowstone. We drove through the park to the campground we had picked out and here we are. We are in Grant Village. We signed up for 3 nights but after our first day here, it looks like we will extent our visit. There is a lot to do here. I was last here 22 years ago and a lot of things have changed. They had a huge forest fire in 1988 that destroyed much of the park. You can still see the damaged areas and their bare empty trees. In the base though there are lots of smaller spruce trees that have been replanted and are growing. They have also repopulated the wolves since I was last here. The wolves were totally eliminated in the 20’s and it was years before they realized that this was bad for the park. The wolves were the top dog (please excuse that one) in the predator column and the park totally lost the ecological balance. Returning the wolves restored that balance and all is well in the park again.
Today we got up and headed up to Old Faithful and its geyser basin. We got there just in time to watch Old Faithful erupt. Then we wandered over to the Old Faithful Inn (under renovation but partially open). We got coffee and a muffin (to split) and wandered up to the second level deck where we watched the next eruption of Old Faithful. We also met a bunch of people and ended up talking to them (more Cheryl than me, of course) until it was time for the nest eruption. We did leave and watched the eruption from the area around the geyser before returning to the camper to change into something cooler and have lunch. That is one thing that is great about having only the camper, you always have your clothes and food with you. No wishing you had it knowing they were miles away.

In the afternoon, we wandered through the geyser basin of which Old Faithful is but a part. We caught several geysers as they erupted and had a nice walk among the geothermal features. Then we visited every gift shop in the area. Cheryl is determined to fit some kind of birthday party into our schedule tomorrow. We did sign up for a cowboy dinner here in the park tomorrow afternoon. We couldn’t get in on the trail ride but there were still some seats left on the wagon out to the party. Oh, do they know what they are getting into?? 60 years old and still able to get into trouble!!

Tonight, we had a campfire and cooked hot dogs in the campfire. Then we went to the amphitheater and saw a presentation on the wolves of Yellowstone (thus the paragraph on wolves). Then we walked home in the dark (most people take their cars but we don’t have one). Now here I am finishing up my journal and listening to some great music (talking heads). We have to study the maps to figure out what we want to do tomorrow so that we can end up in the right place for the cookout. Bye for now, the pie just arrived so I gotta run.

C2