Back on the mainland, mid September and trees ablaze in fall/autumn colours, we drove east on the Yellowhead highway, 1000km towards the Rockies. I'd assumed that the weather would still be mild and we were intending to camp; however there had just been an early dump of snow in Alberta and, after two days on the road, we arrived in Jasper to a definite chill in the air and a new snowline on the mountains. The onset of winter had come a month early according to the townsfolk. The campsite was sheltered amongst the forest on the edge of town, a nice spot with free firewood and right beside the Athabasca river. We managed a couple of nights, pretty cold, my newish sleeping bag held up fairly well, got some extra bedding from a thrift store for the second night for Pam, before moving on south towards Banff.
The route south on Highway 93N, known for some years now as the Icefields Parkway, is considered one of the world's great drives. We'd chosen a good day, cold and mostly clear after some early mist low on the mountains. Moose browsing alongside the road oblivious to the vehicles pulling over and cameras shooting. It's hard to describe how spectacular the route is, driving through a vast glaciated landscape for 230km, following the river and across the watershed with snow flurries at Bow Summit, heading down the spine of the Rockies, parallelling the continental divide. I'd crossed the divide in different places several times on my trip but this was majestic indeed.
The Canadian Rockies are mainly sedimentary, thrust at varying crazy angles; for a long time we passed the Endless Chain Ridge, great smoothed rocky slabs thrust at 60 degrees, scraped off clean along their bedding planes by the last glacier. Sadly the lodgepole forests are half gone due to beetle attack, a mix of green and dead brown on the lower slopes. There were areas where the valley floor opened out and levelled, probably flooded at snow melt, but now an alpine tundra with carpets of Dryas gone to feathery seed, and willows, some still with catkins.
We stopped at both the Athabasca and Sunwapta Falls, where softer limestones have been eroded over the harder quartzite to create deep canyons and potholes (more evocatively 'giants cauldrons' from the French on the interpretation board). The rocky clefts within the gorges are good for rare nesting swifts, already departed for the year. The Parkway is also billed as a great cycle ride, although quiet by now, but I had a quick chat with the only cyclist of the day at Sunwapta. Kamran had previously ridden from Germany back home to Pakistan, and was now on a journey from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska; he told me he didn't feel lonely. See kamranonbike.com for a comprehensive list of gear.
The main stop is at the Columbia Icefield centre and we joined the crowd there to make the pilgrimage over the moraine moonscape to the foot of the Athabasca glacier. There are trail markers that chronicle the receding ice, 1.5km since the late 1800's, accelerating in recent decades. For around $100 you can get out onto the icefield in a massive all terrain vehicle, the Ice Explorer. Somehow there's an irony in all this visitor pressure, ourselves included. Avoiding the centre itself we took a hike uphill to the east, the Wilcox Pass trail, snowy through the spruce and fir forest, to emerge at the treeline and gain a great view of the icefield opposite. Here there were a couple of wooden red chairs to rest on, at least until it got chilly and urged us on. The red chairs 'experience' is a growing Parks Canada initiative to 'connect folk with nature in our country's most unique and treasured places'.
Accommodation in and around Banff was booked up or too expensive so we'd chosen to stay in Golden, 800m below the Parkway via the Kicking Horse Pass, booking airbnb there for six nights. Golden is a renowned outdoor activity centre, a good base for Yoho National Park, although a trek, which we made twice, back up to Banff. We got to know the pass well over subsequent days, the road part of the Trans Canada Highway with some scary trucks on the steep slopes and around the hairpin bends. Most freight, however, is carried on the accompanying Can-Pacific railway, the historic route that connected BC to the rest of Canada. I'm not a rail buff but I'd been impressed earlier watching mile long trains, with engines front, mid and rear, navigating bends at the base of precipitous slopes in the Fraser and Thompson Canyons. Here in the pass the engineering highlight is the pair of spiral tunnels that allow the train to descend/ascend without covering any distance. It was a strange effect to see a train emerging from the mountain whilst its tail end was still entering the tunnel in the opposite direction, higher up. There is then a second spiral to return the train to its original path. I guess the excitement made up somewhat for my deprived childhood, never having had a train set myself.
Golden itself is pleasant enough, we browsed the bookstore, ate some good sushi and lingered at the nearby confluence of the Kicking Horse and Columbia Rivers. There was a notice in town warning of a rogue bear. All the household bins have clips on the lids, removed when they're put out at the kerbside the evening before collection. I wondered whether the bear would be smart enough to figure out the refuse truck's schedule and so be able to raid the unlocked bins in the dead of night.
Banff National Park has some four million visitors a year, heaving in the summer and busy enough now, although around 80% stay close to the car, in town or at the major honeypot sites. Banff town is a great magnet of a resort with restaurants, boutiques, souvenir shops, hotels and entertainment; the huge castle-like Fairmont Banff Springs hotel, above the town, has hundreds of rooms, seven restaurants, two swimming pools, a business centre and golf course. At Park hq I met up with Jane Park, aptly named, who leads the Fire and Vegetation team. Lightning fires are not such a big problem here as elsewhere, nevertheless fires were set historically and her team have been using prescribed burns now for thirty years, on a landscape scale. It's an accepted part of management, not only to reduce the impact of wildfires by reducing fuel load, but also to re-start the fire cycles used by the indigenous people for perhaps thousands of years. I asked if they considered the anthropogenic landscape of grasslands and open forest types as 'natural', and she was in no doubt about that; discussions about what's 'natural' and what's 'cultural' in British landscapes, and the value of these, are at the heart of the rewilding debate. Heading out of town later that day we passed an area that had been burned in 1993, now an open grassy Douglas fir forest with regeneration of a range of trees, good wildlife habitat; on the opposite roadside was a typically denser Douglas stand, valuable in its own right but quite a contrast.
Nearby Emerald Lake is one of the honeypot sites, busy with trippers, a lodge and rental units, but a stunning colour and also redeemed by the vista towards the far mountain slopes where the Burgess shales lie. Their discovery in 1908 was a crucial point in the history of palaeontology. At 508 million years old, they are one of the earliest known soft-bodied fossil beds, all marine creatures at this stage of our planet's history. I'd read about the shales some years ago in Stephen Jay-Gould's book 'Wonderful Life', and was particularly taken with a creature called Hallucigenia, which seemingly had several pairs of legs or tentacles or feeding tubes, nobody was sure which, and is now considered a lobopodian worm; I was pleased to see it featured here on the interpretation panel. Life forms of the time were much more varied than today and lots were fated to become extinct evolutionary experiments, aren't we all? I'd wanted to go hike to the shales, but you're meant to be with a guide these days and anyway it looked like the snow was down to that level and would be covering them.
We had to visit the renowned Lake Louise, crawling on a Sunday, with vast car parks, attendants directing traffic, and crowning hideous 'chateau'. Our day was salvaged by the walk uphill to the teahouse at Lake Agnes, with stunning mountainscapes and glimpses through the spruce and firs of the impossibly blue-green water of Louise below, ringed by sheer cliffs studded with golden larches. Tea wasn't great and no cake to speak of. All these beautiful glacial lakes, I found myself wondering how many words there might be for naming them; when I googled 'turquoise' I got 'a slightly greenish shade of cyan' which doesn't really trip off the tongue. Someone suggested cerulean, which I'd never heard of. Shades of turquoise are known to have a calming affect on people 'prone to panic attacks or mania' so maybe this helps to explain these lakes' popularity, although there's always a selfie madness about. There's a Blue Lake which we didn't get to. Bucking the trend, I noticed a Vermillion Lake on the map, thinking surely there can't be a Berkeley Pit (of Butte fame, see Glacier chapter) in the Rockies; a ranger told me that no, it's a shade of greenish cyan, but fringed more than others with broadleaved fall colour.
I must admit I was beginning to suffer from honeypot fatigue, and some waterfall weariness too. But there are two great falls in Yoho. The Takakkaw Falls, translated roughly as 'wow' from the Cree, a drop of 250m over a sheer cliff from the Daly glacier above. And we hiked to the Wapta Falls, my favourite. What they lack in height, a mere 30m, they make up for in width, 150m, and sheer volume, especially given the recent rain and snowmelt now cascading from the mountain backdrop. Getting close to the water, along the riverbank below, donning waterproofs for the fine spray that would soak you in an instant, the sensation was momentous ... a total immersion in fractal rainbow mist, thunderous noise and negative ions. And not so many people because it involves a walk.
It was time to leave the Rockies and head back west to Vancouver for Pam's flight home. We wanted to break the journey and, despite the lake fatigue, opted for a place called Logan Lake on the map, booking a motel there for two nights. Well the lake turned out to be a pond, even a puddle compared to where we'd been, dating like the rest of the town to a mine that opened in the 1960's; I guess the name of the motel, the Copper Lodge, should have given us some clue.
There's a huge tracked excavator and mammoth haulage truck parked up in the recreation centre car park; the six truck tyres, I read, each contain 1600kg of rubber and 25km of wire, and cost $24000 apiece. I'm a sucker for the facts. The mine itself, a few miles out of town, has a viewing area and kindly interpretation panels featuring benefits for the local wildlife; operated by Highland Valley Copper, it claims to be the largest open cast copper, and molybdenum, mine in Canada if not north America. Back in town we called into the pedestrianised Lakeview Plaza on a Monday morning to get a coffee, so busy there were a couple of mule deer devouring the shrub borders. It was pretty dead, apart from the cafe itself where a bunch of older blokes, ex-miners I guess, were enjoying the retired $5 breakfast deal.
Moving on towards Vancouver, continuing with the lake theme, we stopped off on the last leg at Harrison hotsprings, at the foot of Harrison Lake; here the sulphurous springs were 'discovered' by early pioneers, claimed, fenced off, sold and are now in part monopolised by the resort hotel. We felt quite angry about this and didn't sample the waters. Harrison Lake is huge, a regular watery colour for a change and important in winter for great gatherings of bald eagles, migrating in their thousands to coincide with the seasonal salmon spawning. I've been meeting these great birds at many places on the trip, since my first encounter back in early May, with young in the nest above the Connecticut River. They're a conservation success story, back from the brink after populations of raptors were decimated by ddt in the 50's and 60's. They seem very adaptable to life alongside humans, even in Vancouver, where from their nests they overlook soccer and baseball games, arts venues, parking lots, houses and streets.
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