3409 Jordan Drive, Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, S6V 6Y3, Canada.
E mail: jcrye@shaw.ca
This year we spent our summer holidays
travelling in the Canadian Rockies with Christine’s brother Martin, his wife
Ali and daughters Jo and Katie. The Tyrell Museum of Paleontology at Drumheller, Alberta has evolved considerably since we last visited
with pre teenagers. It truly is world class with many different dinosaur
skeletons and exhibits and was an excellent introduction to seeing the Rockies.
One of the great things about travelling as
a group is being able to hike away from the highway, to experience the scenery
and the quiet, without being eaten by the wildlife. Our first hike was along
the Johnston Canyon in Banff, where a waterfall continues to erode
through limestone to make a narrow canyon. In places the pathway is carried
above the water on metal trelliswork, and to see one waterfall it passes
through a tunnel. This is a walk for the afternoon as that is when it catches
the sun.
Wilcox pass is in Jasper national park and
starts through an open forest climbing the steep side of the valley, coming out
into open moor land overlooking the Columbia glacier. There were soaring eagles and we
met someone whose grandmother lived in the next street to where Christine grew
up!!
The boundary walk in Waterton follows the
shores of Waterton Lake which is a cold fiord crossing the
Canadian-US border. We were accompanied by a Canadian park warden and a US ranger. There are no castles or hidden
airfields marking the international border as you would see in the Alps. With great pride, the border is only a line of cairns. At one point the path passes under an
overhang of the cliff, in another through an area where a forest fire has been.
Waterton is amazing because the mountains stop abruptly and become rolling
prairie. For part of the trek Ranger Rick would tell the first person in the
line the name of a plant and something about it. That person had to stand by it
and tell the rest of the group as they passed. This way we ‘learned’ the names
of 75 plants that we passed. We realised part way through that some of us were
alone on the path for several minutes in bear country waiting to impart the
information!!
Wildlife is always unpredictable, and
sometimes even the flowers will close up and run away. We did see Moose, one
running across the prairie east of Drumheller and one drinking from a lake in
Waterton. We saw black bears with cubs, usually in the long evenings eating
berries both in the north end of Banff and the back canyons of Waterton. Riding the gondola
at Kicking Horse Pass, we saw a grizzly bear lying on his back
in a pool with all four paws sticking up. It turned out that was the captive
bear we were going to see later that day, but as it has 22 acres to live in, it
was still a serendipity.
In several places we saw ospreys nesting or
circling and catching fish, unperturbed by passing trains or trucks. This
continues to be a source of wonder to us, acquainted with the precautions taken
in Britain at Boat of Garten or Grafton Water. Glaciers are
disappearing, but we were still able to take the snow coach onto the Columbia glacier. The water is clear and cold, but
speckled with soot. They say there is still a thousand feet of ice. Other
glaciers are shrinking, most noticeably in Glacier Park in the US. Glacier Park in Canada is somewhere different and it is
impossible to access glaciers there.
At Radium Hot Springs we enjoyed a day
white water rafting on the Kootenay River. Complete with raft wars against the other rafts in the group, it was
a really fun day. The scenery was amazing and we didn’t need to paddle for the
whole trip, only through the rough water areas. That evening we took pizza with
us to the hot
springs.
The “swimming pool” is heated purely by seismic heat from underground and was
44C. They have a surprise pool which at different times can be hot or icy and
there is no way of knowing which it will be.
The spiral tunnels, where the Canadian
Pacific mainline crosses the continental divide and then has to drop down to
the valley of the Kicking Horse River, are still spectacular. We felt privileged
to see two trains coming through so that we could see them passing along all
three levels at the same time. As the railway is a single track, the trains can
be almost a mile long, and usually carry one commodity either grain,
containers, coal or potash. (Google ‘spiral tunnels’ for more diagrams and
photos of how this works)
At Fort Steele, there is a reconstructed Victorian town,
built where a ferry could cross the Kooteney River and abandoned when the railway came and
built its shops elsewhere. We saw a Victorian melodrama and rode the train. A Baldwin locomotive from the US and a coach from the ‘Flying Scotsman’
made this an international experience. We spent two nights in a large chalet at
Fernie. This gave us a day to catch up on sleep and just breathe. It came
complete with washer and drier which Ali thought was its best feature as we
didn’t have to sit at a laundromat for the afternoon. The resort came complete
with swimming pool, hot tubs and water slides so fun was had by all.
At Sparwood, we took a coach trip up the
mountain to see the Elk
River coal mine.
Each day several trains carrying 10,000 tonnes of coal leave for the power
stations and steel mills of China and mid west America. This is extracted by massive mobile
cranes and loaded into 150 tonne trucks. While there is blasting, there isn’t
the tunnelling of the deep mines. What of renewable resources? Not only are the
rivers flowing out of each side of the mountains dammed for hydroelectricity,
but Southern
Alberta is a
windy place and sprouting 150ft windmills.
If there is an area that you would like to ask
about please contact us at jcrye@shaw.ca
Merry Christmas,
John, Christine, Michael, Peter and Deborah
Rye.