On almost every road trip, there is a day where the sightseeing get put aside in the interest of covering distance. Today was one of those days. Both of us were up early so we had what my friend Richard, calls, 'A soft start'. However, were rolled out of Rocky Mountain House after I nearly go clipped by a woman in a blue Toyota car. I had my headlights and both spotlights on and she still didn't see me. Luckily I reacted quickly, as did she after she heard my horn, and no harm was done.
The morning was cool so I elected to wear my gauntlets for the first part of it. Good choice, because my hands were still cool by the time we rode in to the hamlet of Nordegg, 92 kilometres to the west of Rocky Mountain House. After refuelling we made another run to Saskatchewan River Crossing and stopped for a fill up, because the distance to Jasper would have put us in the danger zone for running out of gas. In this country I have a real phobia about running out of gas in the middle of nowhere and without a refill our bikes were getting into the limit of their ranges.
Once again, the scenery was magnificent from the views of Cline Lake to the glacier covered mountains to our west. It is difficult to stop to take photos on the highway so I did very little of that today. The mountains a\surrounding the Crossing are like most of the other peaks in this area, magnificent.
Mountains near Saskatchewan River Crossing, AB.
The ride to Jasper was 153 kilometres and for the most part the highway was clear. However, at one point cars and motorhomes slowed to a stop. Apparently, there was an animal at the side of the highway and everyone had to stop to get a photo, without any regard for people who might actually be using the highway for driving. I saw this once in Yellowstone National Park where traffic was backed up for more than a kilometre because these tourists parked their mobile houses on the side of a narrow road, leaving room for barely more than one lane traffic. All because everyone had to take photos of a bull bison which was lying under a tree beside the road.
The section of this highway runs through the Columbia Icefields which gives this road its name -The Icefields Parkway. There are numerous glaciers hanging of the sides of mountains, but the 'big daddy' of them all is the Athabaska Glacier which used to reach almost to the highway. When I was seventeen, in 1966, I was fortunate enough to attend the Royal Canadian Army Cadets' summer course at the National Army Cadet Camp near Banff. One of the outings that we did was a trip to the Athabaska Glacier we were we were taken in Bombardier tracked vehicles onto the glacier. I had never seen snow in early August and it was a really memorable experience to have a snowball fight in the middle of summer. However, at that point the glacier extended more than half a kilometre more than it does now. It is in retreat like most of the other glaciers in the are due to the increase in temperatures,
A hundred kilometres further on we reached Jasper where I stopped to take some photos of the surrounding mountains and the CNR Northern type 4-8-4 steam locomotive 6015. These machines were monsters built for pulling heavy loads up the steep grades of the Canadian Rockies.
CNR Northern type 4-8-4 steam locomotive on static display, Jasper, AB.
Mountains at Jasper, AB.
Jim, patiently waiting for me to put the camera away.
The last leg of the day's ride was from Jasper to McBride, BC. We did it without stopping. By the time we rolled in to McBride my butt was saying, 'Enough!'. However, on the last part of the ride we saw a black bear in a side hill close to the highway, eating fresh grass and ambling along without a care in the world. I was fortunate to see a grizzly yesterday and we both saw the black bear today, along with two deer.
As I rode along close to the feet of these magnificent mountains I could see the sedimentary rock layers which had been deposited over tens of millions of years and the thrust seven or eight thousand feet in the air by the movement of tectonic plates over further tens of millions of years. The rock layers have been folded, tilted, and thrust into the sky. Riding so close to these gargantuan pieces of the earth's crust gives one a sense of human impermanence and of the miniscule scale in which we exist. I believe, that given some thought, being in these mountains could almost be a spiritual experience, not in a religious way, but in a way that could make us seriously think about our place on this planet and in the universe. Here endeth the lesson.
The temperature in McBride when we arrived was 28C and we were thankful to get into our air conditioned room with two TV channels after a 523 kilometre run today. So, onward to Kamloops and the end of this road trip tomorrow.
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