Part 3B - Thunder Bay west to Puget Sound and home
Danger, Will
Robinson,
danger...
Okay, family, friends, fans and constructive critics...
I win. This journal entry is in excess of 9,000 words. But, it covers 2,100 of some of the most interesting miles in North America - that's slightly more than four words a mile - and I talk more than that. I've put subheads into appropriate places so you can jump to particular sections of the journey home if you like.
Nota Bene: Check out the multimedia page for several new T&M flicks, most notably a catch-up which I promised for quite some time now -- the 2004 Fremont Solstice Parade and the 2004 Gay Pride Parade and the all-new Across Wyoming - a T&M flick with appropriate soundtrack by Anton Dvorak - of the diagonal, across-state, trek I made through Wyoming, starting at the northwest corner in Yellowstone National Park and ending at the southeast corner in the Medicine Bow Range mountains. This flick shows off a side of Wyoming which many don't know exists - the beautiful forested mountains and open plains of a state most think of as an open-pit mine.
Okay, family, friends, fans and constructive critics...
I win. This journal entry is in excess of 9,000 words. But, it covers 2,100 of some of the most interesting miles in North America - that's slightly more than four words a mile - and I talk more than that. I've put subheads into appropriate places so you can jump to particular sections of the journey home if you like.
Nota Bene: Check out the multimedia page for several new T&M flicks, most notably a catch-up which I promised for quite some time now -- the 2004 Fremont Solstice Parade and the 2004 Gay Pride Parade and the all-new Across Wyoming - a T&M flick with appropriate soundtrack by Anton Dvorak - of the diagonal, across-state, trek I made through Wyoming, starting at the northwest corner in Yellowstone National Park and ending at the southeast corner in the Medicine Bow Range mountains. This flick shows off a side of Wyoming which many don't know exists - the beautiful forested mountains and open plains of a state most think of as an open-pit mine.
Part Three B - the continuation
of the trip back to Seattle - this time the departure point was Thunder Bay,
Ontario.
Thunder Bay west
Adam and I get up early and head west out of town. Previously, we'd taken Highway 17 which goes a northwesterly route past the inukshuk's and glaciated and forested lands of the western Canadian Shield. That route takes one past Ignace and Dryden and on to Kenora and thence into Manitoba. This time we decided to take the only other route, Route 11, a straight westerly route which hugs the Boundary Waters region and goes through Atikokan and then Fort Frances and then straight north to Kenora where it meets up with Route 17. Adam had canoed the Boundary Waters on a previous Outward Bound experience and the lower route gives a closer look to the thousands of lakes which dot the region. The geology and topography are really the same but the lower route has more causeways and more direct access to the lakes. Plus, as we learned, it's the "road less travelled" and therefore a nicer experience since most of the traffic in this region is either logging trucks or mining operation trucks.
We breeze along, sighting many of the inukshuks which have been placed along the roadway and on top of adjacent outcroppings, and do, indeed, meander in and out of forests and along lakes. Inukshuks are an ancient custom from pre-Columbian times and consist of the loose rocks, which abound in the entire Canadian Shield area, which have been placed together in such a way that they resemble a human figure with an outstretched arm. Usually the inukshuk is two or four lower rocks, representing the legs, a larger - bridging - rock which sits atop the lower rocks and which has one side longer than the other and represents the torso and arms and then a few rocks atop that to indicate the head. In earlier times these were placed along the path in winter to indicate the location of either a "safe" route to the next village or encampment or to point out the location of a food cache. Nowadays they represent a re-awakening of the native spirit in this land of the Chippewa (Ojibwe). They are wonderful and both an expression of native pride and a convergence of older customs with modern physical graffiti.
Fort Frances west
We we arrive in Fort Frances it's time for lunch so we park near the bridge which leads to International Falls (Minnesota) and walk around looking for a sandwich place. We find one and get a few sandwiches and drinks and then sit right in front of the town hall on a bench on the main street and eat while watching the noonday Fort Frances pedestrian and street traffic. We did become an attraction ourselves since there were no tables and our lunch was basically on the sidewalk in front of us. We walked about the town for some exercise and agreed that this was a really pleasant border town. International Falls/Fort Frances regularly get the lowest temperatures in the winter for the lower 48 contiguous states, temperatures in the minus double-digits. We had also stopped on the way in Atikokan to see if there were any places suitable for lunch and had taken what turned out to be a complete and round-about trip through the town. That town had a huge mining operation which was basically the source of income for the region between Thunder Bay and Fort Frances. I've been impressed with the modern mining operations, both here in the U.S. and in Canada since they don't seem to inject anything into the atmosphere and are usually very well hidden from random view and appear to be modern, efficient, operations. I'm sure the environmental laws are partly responsible but still it's nice to see such a basic operation being performed in a visually and environmentally-friendly manner because we do need these minerals.
Winnipeg
From Fort Frances it was pretty much a straight shot into Manitoba and our next stop - Winnipeg. Manitoba is the crossroads of Canada and sits atop a series of highways which connect it directly to the adjacent U.S. states and as a consequence their roads are greatly improved over the lesser-travelled roads of the Canadian Great Lakes outside Toronto. We've been on this road to Winnipeg many times before and knew, more or less, what to do once we arrived in town. We checked into a relatively "downtown" hotel and took a short break and then set out on foot to explore this really large and important Canadian city yet one more time. This time, though, we had our previous foot experience to guide us and made it an afternoon and evening of digging into the old sections along the downtown rivers and the several shopping and entertainment streets. Winnipeg also has a really large urban population of First Nation residents (aboriginal, as they call themselves in Manitoba). Because of this, Winnipeg is a powerhouse of a city for publishing, broadcasting, insuring and banking associated with the First Nations. The downtown Aboriginal Network studios were as large as any television station studios I've seen in LA or San Francisco or Washington, DC, and the entire downtown area, covering several square miles, is an intermingling of the pioneer French and British periods along with the evolution of the province as its own entity and the later emergence of Winnipeg as a transportation, communications and banking center. It's as complex a city as Boston or San Francisco with multiple downtowns and expansive areas devoted to specific businesses. And, because it's so far from the other major Canadian cities, it's got more to it than the mere million population would suggest. It has the feel, look and power and energy of a city of about two million.
Because it gets so cold in Winnipeg in the winter, there is an interconnected network of aboveground and underground walkways and tunnels which link the city's various sections together - very similar in concept to Montreal's underground or Houston's aboveground (although there it's the heat of summer and not the cold of winter which keeps folks indoors). We had dinner after spending about three hours walking around. We did discover the original settler's area of the town, which like so many other cities, has become the arts and crafts district. Following dinner we retired to get ready for the trip west to Saskatoon.
Yellowhead Highway
On our last trip west we had gone from Winnipeg to Brandon and thence south back into the U.S. On our last trip east we had gone from Montana up to Lethbridge, Alberta, and then on through Regina to Winnipeg. This time we were going to take the Yellowhead Highway from Winnipeg northwest to Saskatoon and then on to Edmonton. The voyage to Saskatoon was enlightening. Western Manitoba, and central Saskatchewan are incredibly rich farmland areas (as is eastern and central Alberta). Driving through the lower reaches of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba as we have in the past introduced us to the continuation of the Great Plains, with its rich and rolling hills and dark earth. The trip through the central Saskatchewan area introduced us to an even richer earth - dark, dark brown and black - very much like Illinois and Iowa. The Canadians export more wheat then we do and after seeing this area it was clear to me that, despite the shorter growing season, they have an abundance of agricultural resources which most of us really don't realize. Western Manitoba, lower and central Saskatchewan and eastern Alberta comprise an agricultural region equivalent to Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and portions of Missouri, Illinois and Kansas. And, it continues further north in each of these Canadian provinces up to the tundra line near the Northwest Territories.
The other thing which struck us was the lack of evidence of industrialized-farming-gone-wild. In the lower stretches of the Great Plains (the U.S. portion) there are endless fields of wheat, corn, soybean and other crops. There are also endless miles of corporate farm silos and stashes of machinery owned by one or more large American agribusiness concerns. There are, to be sure, quite a few local or county or regional cooperatives in all the U.S. Great Plain states, but the overwhelming evidence suggests that the American Great Plains are owned by and manipulated by the Cargill's and ADM's and their kind. In Canada, there are also corporate agribusiness operations but the evidence seems to indicate that the agribusiness presence in Canada is not so nearly ubiquitous as it is here. Most of the silo and farming operation facilities which we passed in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta were local cooperatives - or even individual local owners. Of course, the other notable reality of driving in Canadian Great Plain provinces versus driving in the U.S. Great Plain provinces is how many fewer people there are and consequently how many fewer vehicles on the road. Even in the U.S., there are not that many folks out in the hinterlands of Iowa, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas or eastern Montana and Wyoming. Most of the traffic on the back roads of these states seems to be a mix of local farmers in their trucks, SUVs and cars, and local co-ops and their grain-hauling or farm machinery equipment and on the way-back roads there are usually a handful per mile. In the Canadian plains we were on what would be an old U.S. highway-equivalent highway but which in the Canadian province was the main thoroughfare and there were even fewer vehicles - perhaps one or two per mile. All of which makes for a wonderful driving experience because one can then begin to appreciate the rolling landforms, the undulation of the landscape, and the endless (and I do mean endless) miles of wheat or corn or soybean being grown. The weather was equally wonderful, presenting a cloud-punctuated blue sky with temperatures hovering in the low '70s.
When I was growing up in LA back in the 1950's I was the leading edge of kids who had the television as a baby sitter. I can remember sitting in our house in the Sepulveda Valley (back when there really were orange groves and walnut groves and apricot groves) and watching the Lone Ranger on our Phillips black-and-white 19-inch television set. I was around seven at that time, fifty years ago. That show was brought to me by Cheerios and General Mills. Their advertisements at that time showed endless fields of grain waving in the breeze - oat fields which seemed to go on forever and which seemed a perfect commercial for a Lone Ranger who rode into the endless sunset. The United States has long lost the continuity of such fields mostly because they are now dotted with power lines and distant collections of silos and even bobbing oil well pumps. Well, in Saskatchewan I saw that landscape again, only this time it was in living and breathing color. It was both a tremendous flashback to my own innocence and a wonderful reminder of just how truly beautiful this planet really is. Watching wheat (or oats) grow really is entertainment to some of us.
Saskatoon
We arrived in Saskatoon in the mid-afternoon and found a decent hotel right downtown and once again set out on foot to explore the town. Regina is a smaller city and is associated very heavily with the farming and grain-growing of the lower Saskatchewan area. Regina is also on the main stretch of the Trans-Canada highway (Highway 1) and is sandwiched along that highway with the same town-after-town which one finds in central Iowa or Nebraska. As a result of its location and because it's the provincial capital, Regina "seems" more urban despite its small-town feel. Saskatoon is further afield from the mainstream of Canadian highway traffic but is actually ever-so-slightly bigger than Regina (Regina's about 200,000 these days and Saskatoon is about 225,000, this is metro, by the way). Saskatoon's also sited along a river which Regina isn't. The Saskatchewan River <http://www.fact-index.com/s/sa/saskatchewan_river.html> is a wonderful, major and relatively wild Canadian river. There's the North and South Sasketchewan and they converge and flow into Lake Manitoba and from there the water flows along the Nelson River into Hudson Bay. So, when we were driving across Manitoba to get to Saskatoon we passed this sign which indicated "yet another" Continental Divide, this time it was the point from which the waters flow south into the Mississippi River system and into the Gulf of Mexico and the other waters flow north into the Saskatchewan River system and into the North Sea. I hadn't even thought of that possibility and yet when one actually looks at a map of North America it becomes obvious. Anyway, the Saskatchewan River is a very rapidly moving current - the name comes from the Cree indian word for "swift current." In downtown Saskatoon and again later in Edmonton, where the Saskatchewan also flows through the heart of town, there are signs posted along the river banks warning individuals to not enter the water because of the very swift current and the very real possibility that they would get caught in the current and drown.
Saskatoon's city hall and urban administration complex are right on the river banks and the town, despite being way further afield than Regina, actually has a much more sophisticated "feel" to it than does Regina. But, both Regina and Saskatoon are incredibly beautiful and elaborately landscaped cities. They are among the smaller of Canadian cities but perhaps because Saskatchewan is such a rich farming region or perhaps because of the obvious pride and care of the provincials, both these cities and the many towns in the province have a lovingly-cared-for feel and appearance. The denizens are even warmer than their adjacent provincial neighbors and that's saying something because I've found most Canadians, irrespective of their home province, to be outwardly friendly and open to strangers and visitors. We walked around Saskatoon for a couple hours enjoying what turned out to be a glorious late summer day with relatively warm temperatures. The river is, indeed, rapidly flowing and was a deep blue with evidence of its flow in the steep inclines of both banks. The University of Saskatchewan sits across downtown on the eastern bank of the river and there are quite a few original and newer bridges which cross the two banks. The city has grown up on both shores with the eastern bank having more residential and cultural attractions and the western bank having more commercial and entertainment venues. We ate downtown and walked back to our hotel and prepared for the next day's journey through the rest of Saskatchewan and on into Alberta and Edmonton.
We'd been really enjoying the Yellowhead Highway. Of the two Trans-Canada highways which depart from Winnipeg, the first one, Highway 1, is the more travelled and has more lanes and a more freeway-like construction and feel. The Yellowhead, which is a newer route from Winnipeg to western Canada and British Columbia, also takes a northerly route through the mountains with Highway 1 passing through Banff and Highway 16 (the Yellowhead) passing through Jasper. At Winnipeg we had inquired about the two highways and nearly everyone we spoke with said the Yellowhead was the more scenic, the more leisurely, and the more "fun." At this point in our journey, we had to agree and we'd only been on the Great Plains portion of the highway, but even at this early phase we had seen more wildlife and more natural settings and felt more in touch with our surroundings. Saskatoon was also a great delight because we had been previously quite impressed with Regina's beauty and landscaped layout and here Saskatoon went further in that regard, too. The Canadian Great Plains, like their American cousins, consist of thousands of square miles of farmland criss-crossed by roads based on an initial "mile square" system (yes, even in Canada, the British won out over the French, remember?, even if the Canadians are now totally metrified). That means that western Manitoba, all of Saskatchewan, and eastern Alberta have a road network which pretty much resembles Iowa or Nebraska and a landscape which mimics those states as well - rolling plains with bountiful rivers flowing every-which-way. Saskatoon reminded me a lot of Des Moines, Iowa, another really beautiful and probably under-appreciated American city. There's some great pride and talent in places where grain is grown. Perhaps it's an adjunct of being the keeper of the food.
Edmonton
We leave Saskatoon early morning continuing our northwest heading. Edmonton would be a good day's drive but by leaving at the crack of dawn we'd probably be in Edmonton by mid afternoon because we'd be heading even further north, so the daylight would be longer, and we'd be heading west and entering Mountain Time as soon as we crossed the Alberta border. We began to sense the Edmonton suburbs about 40 minutes before we made it to the center of town. Edmonton used to be the largest city in Alberta but the past two decades, based on the boom in energy-related industries, has caused Calgary to pull ahead - but only slightly. Today's metro Edmonton comes within an eyelash of a million citizens and today's metro Calgary comes within half-an eyelash of a million. Calgary's economy is based nearly exclusively on energy exploration, refining and distrubution. Edmonton's economy includes an energy-business component including refineries, but also includes heavy manufacturing, food processing and distribution and industrial construction. Although Calgary has gained population, Edmonton retains the more-recession-proof economy of the two cities. Both have significant higher education resources with the University of Calgary in that city and the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Edmonton also has a relatively robust tourism industry based on its one truly unique attraction - the West Edmonton Mall, the largest indoor shopping and entertainment complex in the world.
From downtown Calgary the Rocky Mountains appear on the western horizon in much the same way as they do from downtown Denver. In downtown Edmonton the major scenic attractions are the two-or-three-hundred-foot bluffs which line both sides of the Saskatchewan River and the many bridges which link the two sides of the city together. Both cities have light rail transport and Edmonton boasts a bus fleet which operates very much like the King County Metro with nearly all lines converging downtown and route maps on street corners and transit centers in dozens of city-wide locations.
Adam and I checked into our hotel after driving around the downtown core for a bit, back and forth over some of the bridges, and trying to understand the street-numbering system. Twice in this century Edmonton has revised their street grid. First, the center of town was at the intersection of 100 Street and 100 Avenue. In Edmonton, avenues run east-west and streets run north-south, the opposite of Seattle's grid. That meant that in 1914, when the first grid was so defined, the city had east and south room to grow until they reached the zeroith streets and avenues and north and south room to grow, essentially, in perpetuity. Along comes the population boom of the 1980's and all of a sudden there's Edmonton city developing beyond the end of the street grid in the south and in the east. At that time they re-named the streets by adding quadrant denominations - NW, NE, SW and SE. It's really a bust to the chops to arrive in the heart of a city and be at 97th Street NW and 101st Avenue NW. At any rate, it works, we soon were old pros at navigation and because the light rail didn't go to the mall, took one of several buses which run from downtown to the mall.
The bus meandered through several additional commercial districts, an art district and finally a residential town village and there it was - the West Edmonton Mall Transit Station. We exited our bus and entered the mall through Entrance 5A, remembering the number of the entrance. The mall stretches for three city blocks both east-west and north-south. There's an indoor waterslide and water park with ocean-wave pool and other water-based attractions. There's an indoor Six-Flags-like amusement park with superhigh roller coaster and ferris wheel and the like. There's an underwater submarine ride which meanders along a faux river through one whole section of the mall - visitors enter 12-person submarines and then submerge and use periscopes to peer out and watch the shoppers browsing. The submarines actually run on tracks and even though they are, in fact, boats, they operated much more like a zoo train ride. There's an indoor ice-skating rink where they hold tryouts for the local team and weekend competitions between the high schools - this reminded me a lot of the Galleria in Houston, where I saw my first indoor ice skating rink. And, there are over three hundred stores, shops, restaurants, kiosks, and vendors plying their trade and selling anything you could imagine from high-end furniture to low-end bargains. There were three McDonald's and four Tim Horton's (Canada's equivalent of Dunkin' Donuts). There was only one Starbucks but that didn't matter because there were about a half-dozen other, Canadian, coffee houses. The mall is on two levels for the shops and one whole section, the western quadrant, was devoted specifically to department stores, of which there were four. There are two hotels attached to the main complex and the surrounding blocks around the mall have as many as a dozen other hotels. There was an indoor casino along with the super-multiplex cinema and outside there were more casinos and more multiplex cinemas. The whole thing struck Adam and me as being way past overkill. All we could think was that the Edmonton winter must be a very long and very cold winter, elsewise why all this indoor consumerism? It was appointed in the manner of any really upscale mall of lesser proportions but beyond being simply gargantuan in size, just didn't strike us as anything special, but then we're not mall-rats so we were probably not attuned to its unique qualities. It's true that it took us ninety minutes just to prowl around the place - which is as much time as we've spent exploring lesser American and Canadian cities.
When we'd had enough we caught the next bus back downtown and spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around both downtown and across a few bridges which led to the university and then a few more bridges and back into downtown. The legislative buildings - Edmonton is the Capital of Alberta - were impressive and adjacent to the west bank of the steep river bluffs, affording a great view across to the university district. The university was pretty vast and has its own "university district" associated with it - very similar in size and feel to UW and the U-district here but with far fewer "munchkin" street kids. We did want to take the light rail and tried to take an older, but still operating, street trolley which rode high atop one of the bridges only to discover that its operating hours ended earlier than our arrival at the station. That caused us to walk yet another bridge, unfortunately also causing us to not have any real reason to take the light rail. We decided that Edmonton was, in fact, the surprise city of the trip. We had been expecting an entire city revolving around the West Edmonton Mall (which, indeed, there was in that part of town) and not much else. What we found was a sophisticated, urbane and very nicely laid out and appointed city which was as interesting, complex and friendly as any we've run across. The denizens were, as totally expected, friendly and helpful. The streetscape was interesting, alive, vibrant, and inviting. There were an unending set of streets which were set aside as pedestrian malls which ran one or two blocks, interspersed with more ordinary streets with car traffic. There were reasonably attractive high-rise offices, hotels and apartments scattered throughout the entire city. Downtown, obviously, had its own share of these high-rises, but so did three other areas about a mile or two away in another section of town. It was also evident, as it had been in Winnepeg and Saskatoon, that this was an area where the local economy seemed to be thriving and where the townsfolk had enough left over to indulge themselves with lots of urban art and street furniture.
We retired to our hotel for a bit and went out again for dinner and an evening stroll around the city because it was not only so well lit, but the neon on the many buildings and at street level was inviting. Like I said, Edmonton - not just a mall.
Jasper
The next morning we left Edmonton heading west on the Yellowhead Highway heading for Jasper and the Canadian Rockies. As soon as we got into trusty steed (1999 red Volvo S-70) I was somewhat crestfallen. The light rain which had illuminated the city so wonderfully the night before had continued and as we left town turned into a combination of rain and fog. I was hopeful, though, figuring that the Rockies would have their way with the clouds and our final miles toward Jasper would be clear. The power of positive thinking is in its ability to cast negative thoughts aside and stick with an optimistic plan, that, and it sometimes actually works. As we neared within 100 miles of Jasper and began our climb from the high plains into the foothills the rain abated and the fog lifted and what we had before us was what I was hoping for - glorious deep blue skies punctuated periodically by the white puffy clouds which linger above high mountains. Ah, the Rockies would be visible soon - and there they were - on the horizon, stretching north and south to the edge of our vision. As we neared Jasper and started the climb up and into the Rockies it got even better. The Canadian Rockies are something quite beyond expectation for anyone's first encounter. They are not quite as high, by a couple thousand feet, as the Colorado Rockies (the difference between - say - 12-point-something thousand and 14-point-something thousand) but they are so much more spectacular. The Colorado Rockies, and a lot of the Wyoming and Montana Rockies, are much more "mountain"-like - that is they are sloped evenly on all sides and have one or two pronounced or eroded faces. The Canadian Rockies, and they really begin at Glacier National Park in northwest Montana, are more like Colorado Rockies to which some force has cleaved half the mountain away. They are mountain shaped only on three of their four faces, the final face being very often a sheer slab of from three to five thousand feet of nearly-perfectly cleaved granite. They are SO primitive. Plus, they exist farther north than the Colorado Rockies and as a consequence of that and their generally-high altitude have a much more pronounced tree line. And, most of the ones in Canada have resident glaciers (as do the so-named Rockies in Montana). If one were to imagine a granite wilderness on some just-created planet the Canadian Rockies would be a good starting point.
The difference between these mountains and the mountains in Alaska is that the Canadian Rockies actually have three shades of color in the Summer and the Alaska mountains typically only have two shades, as do the Colorado Rockies. In Alaska the two shades are white and green. In Colorado the two shades are gray and green. In northwestern Montana and Alberta and British Columbia the three shades are gray, green and white. Stunning. Couple that view with the incredibly deep valleys the rivers have carved after the glaciers created the original gravity paths. By the time we arrive in the heart of Jasper we're exhausted, mostly from the exclamations of "oh, wow," or "good grief, not another wrenchingly-beautiful set of mountains." But, it's true! These are mountains which take your breath away and it doesn't really matter if the sky is blue and if the weather is pleasant. I've been in the Canadian Rockies when there was nothing but fog and they were still wrenchingly-beautiful. Weather, in fact, enhances their natural beauty because it plays out against and with them. Clouds form above and mists form in between. We park in a lot near the end of the railroad yards on the western edge of downtown Jasper and begin our trek to discover this park town. Jasper and Banff both are towns inside the park limits of Jasper and Banff Canadian National Parks. As such, one must have a job within the town to actually live in these towns. Both towns are nearly uniquely associated with the tourism which the Canadian Rockies has inspired since the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific first developed the railroad passes up to and over the Rockies in these two areas. Jasper is the further north, by slightly over 120 miles. Both towns are the home base for excursion companies, back pack and tracker concerns, guides, environmental awareness and maintenance companies and associations and, of course, for the millions who trek to each area in the summer months.
Jasper is in a very high valley and has wonderful views with mountains all around and a deep valley with coursing river on the west. The town consists of a main road which follows the rail line, with the station right in the heart of town very similar to the style found in the "Old West" in places such as central Texas, central Oklahoma, the Dakotas and eastern Montana. The town's other roads run both parallel to and intersect at angles the main road. There is about a 15-block stretch, using the typically-short blocks of the west, from the southwest to the northeast ends of town. The rest of the town roads only extend a few blocks to the northwest and then they abut against the surrounding ridges, or in the other direction, the steep valleys. Jasper is sort of like Bozeman and Banff is sort of like Jackson Hole. One town is for the true adventurer and outdoorsperson or hiker and camper and the other town is for those who really like their creature comforts but want the views and access that the adventurer has. I'm not sure of the connection or even why the coincidence, but both Bozeman and Jasper are the "northern" towns associated with their respective attractions - in the case of Bozeman it's Yellowstone and National Parks and in the case of Jasper it's Jasper National Park. And, in the case of both of them, they are connected by scenic parkways to their southerly, more tony, towns which are Jackson Hole and Banff, respectively. Grand Teton Parkway connects Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks and the Icelands Parkway connects Jasper and Banff parks.
We were only mildly dismayed to learn that the Canadian National Park employees were staging a "legal strike" and although the park was open (we didn't have to pay to get in as a result of the strike because there were no rangers at the entrance, about 50 miles east of Jasper) there were no visitor headquarters which were open nor was the Jasper museum, run by the Canadian Park Service. The same would be true of Banff we would later learn. Jasper is a gorgeous if "funky" mountain-gateway town with a wide assortment of lodging and places to eat along with the huge array of touring and outbacking companies and their associated REI-like stores. We had lunch, I believe consisting of ice-cream cones and some other munchies, and continued to explore the town for a bit and then headed out for the Icelands Parkway. Previously, I'd been in Jasper on the ViaRail TransCanadian Vistaliner and had explored the town for the 90-minute layover we had. It was a delight then and it was a delight this time. I could easily imagine myself operating a photo gallery or personal exploration service and having a little shop along Connaught Drive or Patricia Street, the two "main" parallel business streets. I could also as easily imagine myself greeting layover passengers on the ViaRail and offering them bargain images of the park and themselves against appropriate backgrounds (Photoshop'd and hard-copy printed in short order, naturally!).
Icelands Parkway
On the other hand I've got a pretty sweet setup here in West Seattle so my imaginative ramblings were just that. We head up and away into the Icelands Parkway. It's called that because the stretch of Canadian Rockies between Jasper and Banff contains a huge set of ice fields (glaciers) nearly all of which appear surprisingly and magically as one rounds each of the dozens of bends in the parkway. These are much larger than the resident glaciers on Mt. Rainier and much less dirtied by the surrounding atmosphere. Rainier's glaciers at times seem to have this overcoat of orange and brown - no doubt the result of millions of tons of exhaust and industrial gasses being released into the Puget Sound area around it. The Icelands Parkway glaciers were about as pure white as the glaciers surrounding Anchorage. It's surprising how much sunlight one mountain can capture and reflect with its glacier. The parkway trip was benefitted by outstanding weather - blue skies with clouds associated with unique and singular mountains and mist and fog associated with unique and singular deep valleys along the route. This is how the weather and land play with each other and driving through this much of that interplay is a never-ending treat in the ways by which geology and atmosphere interact and affect each other. Not to mention the sheer beauty of it all.
About midway between Jasper and Banff I had another of those amazing wildlife experiences which trips like this have accustomed me to. I rounded one bend and a thousand-feet-distant saw what definitely looked like a large dog trotting across the roadway. The parkway, I should point out, was virtually devoid of any other traffic except me. The tourist season was effectively over and there weren't the usual plethora of tour and excursion buses which ply this route earlier in the Summer. Since it's a park there are no commercial vehicles allowed on this section of park road except for local delivery vehicles between either Jasper or Banff and the very few outposts which the Canadian Park Service has up here. This animal clearly had road savvy. I'll gender-fy "him" and refer to him as a male creature. As he got to the other side of the roadway he stopped on the shoulder and turned around and intently watched as I drove closer. The speed along this parkway was 50 km/hour and I slowed considerably from that when I saw this "dog." As I got to within about a hundred-fifty feet or so I realized it was a timber wolf and slowed even further. As we drew nearer I could see that he was watching me with what looked like genuine curiosity. I didn't sense in his body language or any motion of his limbs that he was afraid or fearful. As I got to within about fifty feet we were close enough to engage in eye contact. We looked at each other as I passed by him and I got this outrageously uplifting feeling, as if somehow he had imbued me with his own sense of the wild and his complete freedom from any of the lanyards which attach themselves to me or my life. In return I offered unabashed admiration and respect and a "you look great" compliment.
And then it was more glaciers and more scarred granite cliffs off the side of even more twelve-thousand-foot mountains with even more waterfalls cascading off the sides and down into the meandering streams. I was surprised at how much water there still was this late in the season. Some of the creeks and streams we passed looked as full and raging as they must have been in the Spring melt. I later learned that it had been a very rainy and wet season in these parts of the Canadian Rockies and that most folks had considered they had been cheated out of Summer. Even more the better that we experienced outstanding and mountain-perfect weather for this passage.
Banff
As we neared the end of the parkway it became evident that we were also re-entering that portion of the Canadian Rockies which affords the commercial traveler access through the mountains. Banff is crossed by the original and now-very-freeway-like TransCanada Highway 1. It's a busy road with all the east-west Canadian truck and other commercial traffic as well as it's being the major passenger car road. We intersect Highway 1, merge into the busy freeway and take the second of two Banff exits. This is really unusual. There are no major thoroughfares bisecting Yellowstone or Glacier or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon or even Shenandoah. But, believe me, TransCanada Highway 1 between Kamloops and Calgary is about as busy as Interstate 80 between Des Moines and Omaha. It's somewhat unnerving to be virtually alone in the high Canadian Rockies with a wolf and an hour later fighting interstate traffic to merge into the exit lane. Just one more of the contrasts which this trip afforded me and one more of the representative dichotomies of life on Planet Earth in the 21st Century. It almost seemed like that scene in Star Trek where Captain Kirk is whisked off the face of Half Dome in Yosemite. Somehow I had to regain the tranquility and feeling of isolation but it would have to be all in my mind because Banff, I knew from previous experience, was a sophisticated and essentially world-class resort "city" and I was about to enter its domain.
Adam and I had been trying to find hotels in the heart of the cities we were traveling through and from Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, to Sault St. Marie, on to Thunder Bay and then Winnepeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton we had succeeded in finding decent or even downright nice hotels right in the heart of town. We had checked on whether or not the Banff Springs Hotel (one of the continent's original super-luxury resort palaces) was even in consideration. It was not, Summer rates, which were in effect until September 15, were from fourteen-hundred to twenty-one hundred dollars. It didn't even matter that they were Canadian dollars, which has been getting very strong with respect to the U.S. dollar. When Katherine and I actually did stay at the Banff Springs Hotel back in 1974 it cost us less than two hundred Canadian dollars and back then the exchange rate was seventy-two cents for one Canadian dollar. This year the exchange rate was seventy-eight cents for one Canadian dollar and as cool, sauve, tres-chic, beyond-the-pale, ne-plus-ultra as the Banff Springs Hotel really is, it was out of the question to spend nearly eleven-hundred American dollars for a night's stay.
We did splurge nevertheless. We stayed at the second-nicest hotel in Banff, the Mt. Royal Hotel, right downtown, right across the street from the Hudson Bay Company's Banff store (incorporated May 2, 1670, as their sign says) and with a bay window overlooking the street and all the walkers and visitors doing the European evening promenade. There really was an unnaturally rich mixture of Continentals visiting. Our bay window overlooked Banff Avenue between Caribou and Buffalo Streets, our two queen-sized beds were overstuffed and really, really comfortable, and the television was large screen, modern and the remote worked (they often don't). We even, because we were in one of the hotel's original sections rather than the added-on more modern section with the lobby, had our own private entrance to the hotel right on Banff Avenue, which our room key opened like it should. It was $220 Canadian, roughly $172 American. That normally would have gotten us three night's stay in the other cities but here, well, Banff is a lot of things very positive and illuminating and world-class and it's costly, it's that simple. But what the heck, we could practically fall into any restaurant in town. Plus, because it is a world-class resort town, everything stayed open until at least 11:00 pm, including the Hudson Bay Company, which was a good thing because after dinner I needed to buy some underwear and socks - we had run out of clean pairs and with just one or two more days left it seemed senseless to try and find a laundromat.
We checked in, exclaimed admiringly enough what money will buy in a hotel room and set out to explore the town and the gardens and check out the possibilities for dinner. We were way up there in the mountains and had lost some latitude so dark was going to be sooner than we had been experiencing which made our first goal that of exploration and photography. We "oohed" and "aahed" at the gardens adorning the Banff-Jasper administrative offices right at the end of Banff Avenue - a castle, really, with elegant English gardens which were, as one would expect, perfect in every way, every plant with the right flower, no flower wilted or faded, and every evergreen tree or bush perfectly manicured. And why not? This was Canada's showcase park, the town being inside the park and the park surrounding us for mountain range after mountain range. We wandered around town, through the gardens, lingering on the bridge across the Bow River and going in and through the stores. We found what turned out to be a four-star Chinese restaurant in one of those Pacific-Coast-style Asian arcades right along Banff Avenue and dined ourselves silly and then went to the Bay Company to get socks and underwear and then retired to our room to watch TV and look out the bay window. Wow! If I had money, Banff is one of those places, like Mackinac Island, where I'd spend a few weeks every year. As it is I'm truly fortunate to even be able to enjoy myself in these places for a day or even a fraction of a day.
The next morning we got up and once again treated ourselves - this time to the breakfast buffet in the main dining room of the Mt. Royal. The waitresses kept asking if we were part of this or that excursion group, because if we had been then our breakfast would have been taken care of as part of the deal. As it were breakfast cost us about $15 each. Not bad because we could have pigged out on a tremendous array of proteins, roughage, carbohydrates and fats. What we did was get some really tasty muffins and pig out on nicely crisped and perfectly done bacon. Yum...sugar and salt, my favorite.
Revelstoke
We headed west on Highway 1 with Revelstoke as our first goal. I had wanted to see what Revelstoke as a town was like because it's the homebase for more extreme skiers and snowboarders who die in avalanches than any other city on the planet. Regularly at least a dozen and more often than not as many as several dozen such extreme sports enthusiasts die in the snow-covered and glacier-covered mountains surrounding Revelstoke. As a resident of Washington, DC, I was regularly accustomed each Spring to learn through the media of one, two or, some years as many as nearly a dozen, kayakers who had been swamped by the raging Spring waters of the Potomac near Great Falls and drowned. Here in Seattle I've already become accustomed to the one, two, three or half-dozen or more mountaineers who die in falls from the same exact spots on the different faces of Mt. Rainier. I've come up with two new nicknames for Mt. Rainier (I would have been a really good native American, I can track, I can see the subtleties in the world around me, I can smell and hear other creatures, and I can name something because of what it does to me). The first is one I coined last Winter and which made even more sense this past Spring as even more people fell from its slopes - and that nickname is Death Mountain. More recently, in the pale atmospheric haze which becomes the air around Puget Sound in the Summer, I've nicknamed Rainier "Ghost Mountain." There's this great effect which occurs right after sunset where the atmosphere and the forested and snow-covered sides of Mt. Rainier become the same color which is a very faint and pale blue-gray. Above this, at the glacier-level and still being illuminated by the lingering twilight, hovers this white and glowing tinier mountain, literally the top two-or-three-thousand feet of the fourteen-thousand-foot volcano. The mountain, then, becomes a ghost hovering above its corporeal self. Wonderful mountain, by the way, a source of constant delight and visual enlightenment.
Point being that I wanted to see what sort of town hosted these adventurers, quite a number of whom would never have that next morning's coffee or that same evening's dinner. We arrived on a Sunday morning at about 9:00 and drove all around the town. It's about a square mile and sits right on the upper reaches of the Columbia River. It's obviously flat right in town but the town, like Missoula, Montana, is surrounded by these great foothills and early stages of the Canadian Rockies on the west front. In fact, for all practical purposes the town sits at the confluence of the North Cascades, the Canadian Rockies, and the Coast Range. Of course, the actual mountain ranges have more localized names because they are ranges associated with these larger geological features. We drove into the heart of town, it's two north-south parallel streets serving as the ladder sides for a set of rungs running about a third of a mile. It looked like a combination resort, scientific study home base, outfitting and engineering research and manufacturing, and escape town. There was evidence of long habitation in some of the neighborhoods, looking like some of those in Montana or Wyoming with original hundred-year-old houses still being used quite handily. There was also evidence of software development, probably for what looked like a seismic and glacier research community. In short, it looked like a prosperous town in a delightful location. We found what we were looking for - the local coffee shop which bakes its own scones and went inside, found a den area which suited us as passers-through, got our scones and cappuccinos and sat down to watch the Sunday-morning traffic in a tony little coffee house in the town which claims more avalanche extreme sport deaths than any other. And then it was back on the road this time to find Alberta 97, which would take us down through the "Sunshine Valley," which is the valley that Okanagan Lake sits in.
Okanagan Lake & Sunshine Valley
Highway 1, the TransCanada, intercepts Lake Okanagan at the northern end of its 90 mile length. It's another of the hundreds of glacier-carved lakes between mountains in British Columbia, Alberta, Montana and Washington. Highway 97 meanders from one side to the other the length of the lake because these kinds of lakes can get very narrow and often have what is almost a land-bridge here and there. The first town of consequence is Kelowna, which turns out to be quite the local money-making community. In addition to being a first rate lake resort town (it had a lot of the feel of the area around the eastern end of Green Lake here in Seattle, including the tony shops and restaurants), it also appeared to be the home town for this region of British Columbia's health and banking and communications communities. It also had a lot of lumber-related industries (think of pre-fab log cabins and then think of about a dozen companies making these, many adjacent to each other on the highway). And, like every community west of the Mississippi which still has native tribal members, it had a booming casino industry. We stopped to watch the kite-skiers being towed across the lake and got hot dogs and french fries and soft drinks at a concession right on the lakeside boardwalk right across from what looked like the northern edition of Rodeo Drive. There were hundreds of folks out walking on the lakeside path. It was really a busy recreational weekend here in Kelowna right about midway along the great Okanagan Lake. Finishing our lunch, we got back in the car and headed south for Washington State. Along the way it began to dawn on us that the nickname "Sunshine Valley" and the region around us was British Columbia's wine country. It looked like a replica of Sonoma County with vineyards clinging to the banks of the lake and up along the hills which ringed the lake (Sonoma has rivers but the visual effect remained the same). By the time we were about halfway from Kelowna to the U.S. border we had passed no less than 50 vineyards and their wineries. Names which I wouldn't remember but all family names, many of them combinations of Western and Eastern surnames and all of them having at least a respectable wine drinking house. Another treat of discovery. I didn't even know that BC had a wine industry - though it makes perfect sense. And here I am cruising through the thick of the vine.
We traveled to the end of the lake, passing a resort town about every 15 miles or so, wherever there was a significant bend on this or the other shoreline of the lake - just enough to allow a resort town to sit on a peninsula jutting out into the lake. Very pretty. Very busy, too. Lots of people and lots of timber business and lots of wine business. Enough for glass factories and graphics shops and fancy printing outfits, not to mention specialty crating and shipping concerns. All of which require insurers and bankers. You get the picture - productive place with booming modern economy, again set in an outstanding natural venue of mountains and water with a temperate clime, too.
North Cascades Highway
The entry back into the U.S. was as uneventful and prosaic as the entry into Canada days earlier. Either we are being profiled and I'm so benign as to be ignored or we've been exceptionally lucky our last dozen trips across the border. I've never had so much as an eyebrow raised on me by either American or Canadian border agents. Anyway, it did feel good to be back on native turf again and we were going to head west as soon as we intersected Washington State Highway 20 - the North Cascades Highway. We'd been in the mountains for part of the day before, all of today and it was going to continue through nightfall. I've wanted to travel any part of Highway 20 since I moved out here and in that time everyone has been mentioning the Skagit Valley - which Highway 20 runs straight through - as being where they wanted to buy land and escape. Even though it was getting dark I was beginning to see why all the fuss. This is one gorgeous highway, the Cascades I already knew were outstanding mountains, craggy, forested, many with tops covered still in the Summer with snow, and the home range for the volcanoes of the Pacific Coast. Highway 20, even more than Highway 2 and even much more than Interstate 90 crosses the Cascades dead-on. These are north-south running ranges and though Interstate 90 is one of the most scenic highways on the continent, the old US Highway 2 is even better because it was engineered even longer ago and retains a lot of its original switch-back character. Highway 20 goes those other two one better - it's a state highway and is even narrower and cuts through a lesser explored region in a much lower population density. Besides which, it virtually straddles the two countries. We zoom down the valley to Burlington and get on Interstate 5, the Pacific Coast's version of I-95 and just as busy and ill-kept.
In a short hour we're home, across the West Seattle Bridge and unpacking the car. Ah, home again. It felt very, very good to be home - not because I missed it so much as because I had seen too much in the previous three weeks and my mind was exhausted processing all those views, all those encounters, all those city grids and highway systems, all that currency conversion, all the complexities of my extended family reunion, all the living out of a suitcase - even if it was a well-appointed and equipped suitcase. And, I'd delivered my last living-at-home son back to his home, safely and in one piece. End of yet another grand adventure. I'd accrued upwards of two gigabytes of image data and seen so many things new to me. It was a wonderful trip.
Pictures and other visual memorabilia of this saga will be forthcoming. And, for those who have made it this far, thanks for the patience and attention. Next entry will be within a few days and may be among these topics: Thoughts about Seattle after a year's residence; a re-found journal entry from 1988 (yeah, I've been "blogging" for a long, long time - this one's even an original electronic posting from the days of x.400 systems and VAXmail and BBS's which is to say pre-internet). In the mean time, my life has become complicated again - Seattle does that to innocent bystanders.
Chas
Thunder Bay west
Adam and I get up early and head west out of town. Previously, we'd taken Highway 17 which goes a northwesterly route past the inukshuk's and glaciated and forested lands of the western Canadian Shield. That route takes one past Ignace and Dryden and on to Kenora and thence into Manitoba. This time we decided to take the only other route, Route 11, a straight westerly route which hugs the Boundary Waters region and goes through Atikokan and then Fort Frances and then straight north to Kenora where it meets up with Route 17. Adam had canoed the Boundary Waters on a previous Outward Bound experience and the lower route gives a closer look to the thousands of lakes which dot the region. The geology and topography are really the same but the lower route has more causeways and more direct access to the lakes. Plus, as we learned, it's the "road less travelled" and therefore a nicer experience since most of the traffic in this region is either logging trucks or mining operation trucks.
We breeze along, sighting many of the inukshuks which have been placed along the roadway and on top of adjacent outcroppings, and do, indeed, meander in and out of forests and along lakes. Inukshuks are an ancient custom from pre-Columbian times and consist of the loose rocks, which abound in the entire Canadian Shield area, which have been placed together in such a way that they resemble a human figure with an outstretched arm. Usually the inukshuk is two or four lower rocks, representing the legs, a larger - bridging - rock which sits atop the lower rocks and which has one side longer than the other and represents the torso and arms and then a few rocks atop that to indicate the head. In earlier times these were placed along the path in winter to indicate the location of either a "safe" route to the next village or encampment or to point out the location of a food cache. Nowadays they represent a re-awakening of the native spirit in this land of the Chippewa (Ojibwe). They are wonderful and both an expression of native pride and a convergence of older customs with modern physical graffiti.
Fort Frances west
We we arrive in Fort Frances it's time for lunch so we park near the bridge which leads to International Falls (Minnesota) and walk around looking for a sandwich place. We find one and get a few sandwiches and drinks and then sit right in front of the town hall on a bench on the main street and eat while watching the noonday Fort Frances pedestrian and street traffic. We did become an attraction ourselves since there were no tables and our lunch was basically on the sidewalk in front of us. We walked about the town for some exercise and agreed that this was a really pleasant border town. International Falls/Fort Frances regularly get the lowest temperatures in the winter for the lower 48 contiguous states, temperatures in the minus double-digits. We had also stopped on the way in Atikokan to see if there were any places suitable for lunch and had taken what turned out to be a complete and round-about trip through the town. That town had a huge mining operation which was basically the source of income for the region between Thunder Bay and Fort Frances. I've been impressed with the modern mining operations, both here in the U.S. and in Canada since they don't seem to inject anything into the atmosphere and are usually very well hidden from random view and appear to be modern, efficient, operations. I'm sure the environmental laws are partly responsible but still it's nice to see such a basic operation being performed in a visually and environmentally-friendly manner because we do need these minerals.
Winnipeg
From Fort Frances it was pretty much a straight shot into Manitoba and our next stop - Winnipeg. Manitoba is the crossroads of Canada and sits atop a series of highways which connect it directly to the adjacent U.S. states and as a consequence their roads are greatly improved over the lesser-travelled roads of the Canadian Great Lakes outside Toronto. We've been on this road to Winnipeg many times before and knew, more or less, what to do once we arrived in town. We checked into a relatively "downtown" hotel and took a short break and then set out on foot to explore this really large and important Canadian city yet one more time. This time, though, we had our previous foot experience to guide us and made it an afternoon and evening of digging into the old sections along the downtown rivers and the several shopping and entertainment streets. Winnipeg also has a really large urban population of First Nation residents (aboriginal, as they call themselves in Manitoba). Because of this, Winnipeg is a powerhouse of a city for publishing, broadcasting, insuring and banking associated with the First Nations. The downtown Aboriginal Network studios were as large as any television station studios I've seen in LA or San Francisco or Washington, DC, and the entire downtown area, covering several square miles, is an intermingling of the pioneer French and British periods along with the evolution of the province as its own entity and the later emergence of Winnipeg as a transportation, communications and banking center. It's as complex a city as Boston or San Francisco with multiple downtowns and expansive areas devoted to specific businesses. And, because it's so far from the other major Canadian cities, it's got more to it than the mere million population would suggest. It has the feel, look and power and energy of a city of about two million.
Because it gets so cold in Winnipeg in the winter, there is an interconnected network of aboveground and underground walkways and tunnels which link the city's various sections together - very similar in concept to Montreal's underground or Houston's aboveground (although there it's the heat of summer and not the cold of winter which keeps folks indoors). We had dinner after spending about three hours walking around. We did discover the original settler's area of the town, which like so many other cities, has become the arts and crafts district. Following dinner we retired to get ready for the trip west to Saskatoon.
Yellowhead Highway
On our last trip west we had gone from Winnipeg to Brandon and thence south back into the U.S. On our last trip east we had gone from Montana up to Lethbridge, Alberta, and then on through Regina to Winnipeg. This time we were going to take the Yellowhead Highway from Winnipeg northwest to Saskatoon and then on to Edmonton. The voyage to Saskatoon was enlightening. Western Manitoba, and central Saskatchewan are incredibly rich farmland areas (as is eastern and central Alberta). Driving through the lower reaches of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba as we have in the past introduced us to the continuation of the Great Plains, with its rich and rolling hills and dark earth. The trip through the central Saskatchewan area introduced us to an even richer earth - dark, dark brown and black - very much like Illinois and Iowa. The Canadians export more wheat then we do and after seeing this area it was clear to me that, despite the shorter growing season, they have an abundance of agricultural resources which most of us really don't realize. Western Manitoba, lower and central Saskatchewan and eastern Alberta comprise an agricultural region equivalent to Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and portions of Missouri, Illinois and Kansas. And, it continues further north in each of these Canadian provinces up to the tundra line near the Northwest Territories.
The other thing which struck us was the lack of evidence of industrialized-farming-gone-wild. In the lower stretches of the Great Plains (the U.S. portion) there are endless fields of wheat, corn, soybean and other crops. There are also endless miles of corporate farm silos and stashes of machinery owned by one or more large American agribusiness concerns. There are, to be sure, quite a few local or county or regional cooperatives in all the U.S. Great Plain states, but the overwhelming evidence suggests that the American Great Plains are owned by and manipulated by the Cargill's and ADM's and their kind. In Canada, there are also corporate agribusiness operations but the evidence seems to indicate that the agribusiness presence in Canada is not so nearly ubiquitous as it is here. Most of the silo and farming operation facilities which we passed in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta were local cooperatives - or even individual local owners. Of course, the other notable reality of driving in Canadian Great Plain provinces versus driving in the U.S. Great Plain provinces is how many fewer people there are and consequently how many fewer vehicles on the road. Even in the U.S., there are not that many folks out in the hinterlands of Iowa, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas or eastern Montana and Wyoming. Most of the traffic on the back roads of these states seems to be a mix of local farmers in their trucks, SUVs and cars, and local co-ops and their grain-hauling or farm machinery equipment and on the way-back roads there are usually a handful per mile. In the Canadian plains we were on what would be an old U.S. highway-equivalent highway but which in the Canadian province was the main thoroughfare and there were even fewer vehicles - perhaps one or two per mile. All of which makes for a wonderful driving experience because one can then begin to appreciate the rolling landforms, the undulation of the landscape, and the endless (and I do mean endless) miles of wheat or corn or soybean being grown. The weather was equally wonderful, presenting a cloud-punctuated blue sky with temperatures hovering in the low '70s.
When I was growing up in LA back in the 1950's I was the leading edge of kids who had the television as a baby sitter. I can remember sitting in our house in the Sepulveda Valley (back when there really were orange groves and walnut groves and apricot groves) and watching the Lone Ranger on our Phillips black-and-white 19-inch television set. I was around seven at that time, fifty years ago. That show was brought to me by Cheerios and General Mills. Their advertisements at that time showed endless fields of grain waving in the breeze - oat fields which seemed to go on forever and which seemed a perfect commercial for a Lone Ranger who rode into the endless sunset. The United States has long lost the continuity of such fields mostly because they are now dotted with power lines and distant collections of silos and even bobbing oil well pumps. Well, in Saskatchewan I saw that landscape again, only this time it was in living and breathing color. It was both a tremendous flashback to my own innocence and a wonderful reminder of just how truly beautiful this planet really is. Watching wheat (or oats) grow really is entertainment to some of us.
Saskatoon
We arrived in Saskatoon in the mid-afternoon and found a decent hotel right downtown and once again set out on foot to explore the town. Regina is a smaller city and is associated very heavily with the farming and grain-growing of the lower Saskatchewan area. Regina is also on the main stretch of the Trans-Canada highway (Highway 1) and is sandwiched along that highway with the same town-after-town which one finds in central Iowa or Nebraska. As a result of its location and because it's the provincial capital, Regina "seems" more urban despite its small-town feel. Saskatoon is further afield from the mainstream of Canadian highway traffic but is actually ever-so-slightly bigger than Regina (Regina's about 200,000 these days and Saskatoon is about 225,000, this is metro, by the way). Saskatoon's also sited along a river which Regina isn't. The Saskatchewan River <http://www.fact-index.com/s/sa/saskatchewan_river.html> is a wonderful, major and relatively wild Canadian river. There's the North and South Sasketchewan and they converge and flow into Lake Manitoba and from there the water flows along the Nelson River into Hudson Bay. So, when we were driving across Manitoba to get to Saskatoon we passed this sign which indicated "yet another" Continental Divide, this time it was the point from which the waters flow south into the Mississippi River system and into the Gulf of Mexico and the other waters flow north into the Saskatchewan River system and into the North Sea. I hadn't even thought of that possibility and yet when one actually looks at a map of North America it becomes obvious. Anyway, the Saskatchewan River is a very rapidly moving current - the name comes from the Cree indian word for "swift current." In downtown Saskatoon and again later in Edmonton, where the Saskatchewan also flows through the heart of town, there are signs posted along the river banks warning individuals to not enter the water because of the very swift current and the very real possibility that they would get caught in the current and drown.
Saskatoon's city hall and urban administration complex are right on the river banks and the town, despite being way further afield than Regina, actually has a much more sophisticated "feel" to it than does Regina. But, both Regina and Saskatoon are incredibly beautiful and elaborately landscaped cities. They are among the smaller of Canadian cities but perhaps because Saskatchewan is such a rich farming region or perhaps because of the obvious pride and care of the provincials, both these cities and the many towns in the province have a lovingly-cared-for feel and appearance. The denizens are even warmer than their adjacent provincial neighbors and that's saying something because I've found most Canadians, irrespective of their home province, to be outwardly friendly and open to strangers and visitors. We walked around Saskatoon for a couple hours enjoying what turned out to be a glorious late summer day with relatively warm temperatures. The river is, indeed, rapidly flowing and was a deep blue with evidence of its flow in the steep inclines of both banks. The University of Saskatchewan sits across downtown on the eastern bank of the river and there are quite a few original and newer bridges which cross the two banks. The city has grown up on both shores with the eastern bank having more residential and cultural attractions and the western bank having more commercial and entertainment venues. We ate downtown and walked back to our hotel and prepared for the next day's journey through the rest of Saskatchewan and on into Alberta and Edmonton.
We'd been really enjoying the Yellowhead Highway. Of the two Trans-Canada highways which depart from Winnipeg, the first one, Highway 1, is the more travelled and has more lanes and a more freeway-like construction and feel. The Yellowhead, which is a newer route from Winnipeg to western Canada and British Columbia, also takes a northerly route through the mountains with Highway 1 passing through Banff and Highway 16 (the Yellowhead) passing through Jasper. At Winnipeg we had inquired about the two highways and nearly everyone we spoke with said the Yellowhead was the more scenic, the more leisurely, and the more "fun." At this point in our journey, we had to agree and we'd only been on the Great Plains portion of the highway, but even at this early phase we had seen more wildlife and more natural settings and felt more in touch with our surroundings. Saskatoon was also a great delight because we had been previously quite impressed with Regina's beauty and landscaped layout and here Saskatoon went further in that regard, too. The Canadian Great Plains, like their American cousins, consist of thousands of square miles of farmland criss-crossed by roads based on an initial "mile square" system (yes, even in Canada, the British won out over the French, remember?, even if the Canadians are now totally metrified). That means that western Manitoba, all of Saskatchewan, and eastern Alberta have a road network which pretty much resembles Iowa or Nebraska and a landscape which mimics those states as well - rolling plains with bountiful rivers flowing every-which-way. Saskatoon reminded me a lot of Des Moines, Iowa, another really beautiful and probably under-appreciated American city. There's some great pride and talent in places where grain is grown. Perhaps it's an adjunct of being the keeper of the food.
Edmonton
We leave Saskatoon early morning continuing our northwest heading. Edmonton would be a good day's drive but by leaving at the crack of dawn we'd probably be in Edmonton by mid afternoon because we'd be heading even further north, so the daylight would be longer, and we'd be heading west and entering Mountain Time as soon as we crossed the Alberta border. We began to sense the Edmonton suburbs about 40 minutes before we made it to the center of town. Edmonton used to be the largest city in Alberta but the past two decades, based on the boom in energy-related industries, has caused Calgary to pull ahead - but only slightly. Today's metro Edmonton comes within an eyelash of a million citizens and today's metro Calgary comes within half-an eyelash of a million. Calgary's economy is based nearly exclusively on energy exploration, refining and distrubution. Edmonton's economy includes an energy-business component including refineries, but also includes heavy manufacturing, food processing and distribution and industrial construction. Although Calgary has gained population, Edmonton retains the more-recession-proof economy of the two cities. Both have significant higher education resources with the University of Calgary in that city and the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Edmonton also has a relatively robust tourism industry based on its one truly unique attraction - the West Edmonton Mall, the largest indoor shopping and entertainment complex in the world.
From downtown Calgary the Rocky Mountains appear on the western horizon in much the same way as they do from downtown Denver. In downtown Edmonton the major scenic attractions are the two-or-three-hundred-foot bluffs which line both sides of the Saskatchewan River and the many bridges which link the two sides of the city together. Both cities have light rail transport and Edmonton boasts a bus fleet which operates very much like the King County Metro with nearly all lines converging downtown and route maps on street corners and transit centers in dozens of city-wide locations.
Adam and I checked into our hotel after driving around the downtown core for a bit, back and forth over some of the bridges, and trying to understand the street-numbering system. Twice in this century Edmonton has revised their street grid. First, the center of town was at the intersection of 100 Street and 100 Avenue. In Edmonton, avenues run east-west and streets run north-south, the opposite of Seattle's grid. That meant that in 1914, when the first grid was so defined, the city had east and south room to grow until they reached the zeroith streets and avenues and north and south room to grow, essentially, in perpetuity. Along comes the population boom of the 1980's and all of a sudden there's Edmonton city developing beyond the end of the street grid in the south and in the east. At that time they re-named the streets by adding quadrant denominations - NW, NE, SW and SE. It's really a bust to the chops to arrive in the heart of a city and be at 97th Street NW and 101st Avenue NW. At any rate, it works, we soon were old pros at navigation and because the light rail didn't go to the mall, took one of several buses which run from downtown to the mall.
The bus meandered through several additional commercial districts, an art district and finally a residential town village and there it was - the West Edmonton Mall Transit Station. We exited our bus and entered the mall through Entrance 5A, remembering the number of the entrance. The mall stretches for three city blocks both east-west and north-south. There's an indoor waterslide and water park with ocean-wave pool and other water-based attractions. There's an indoor Six-Flags-like amusement park with superhigh roller coaster and ferris wheel and the like. There's an underwater submarine ride which meanders along a faux river through one whole section of the mall - visitors enter 12-person submarines and then submerge and use periscopes to peer out and watch the shoppers browsing. The submarines actually run on tracks and even though they are, in fact, boats, they operated much more like a zoo train ride. There's an indoor ice-skating rink where they hold tryouts for the local team and weekend competitions between the high schools - this reminded me a lot of the Galleria in Houston, where I saw my first indoor ice skating rink. And, there are over three hundred stores, shops, restaurants, kiosks, and vendors plying their trade and selling anything you could imagine from high-end furniture to low-end bargains. There were three McDonald's and four Tim Horton's (Canada's equivalent of Dunkin' Donuts). There was only one Starbucks but that didn't matter because there were about a half-dozen other, Canadian, coffee houses. The mall is on two levels for the shops and one whole section, the western quadrant, was devoted specifically to department stores, of which there were four. There are two hotels attached to the main complex and the surrounding blocks around the mall have as many as a dozen other hotels. There was an indoor casino along with the super-multiplex cinema and outside there were more casinos and more multiplex cinemas. The whole thing struck Adam and me as being way past overkill. All we could think was that the Edmonton winter must be a very long and very cold winter, elsewise why all this indoor consumerism? It was appointed in the manner of any really upscale mall of lesser proportions but beyond being simply gargantuan in size, just didn't strike us as anything special, but then we're not mall-rats so we were probably not attuned to its unique qualities. It's true that it took us ninety minutes just to prowl around the place - which is as much time as we've spent exploring lesser American and Canadian cities.
When we'd had enough we caught the next bus back downtown and spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around both downtown and across a few bridges which led to the university and then a few more bridges and back into downtown. The legislative buildings - Edmonton is the Capital of Alberta - were impressive and adjacent to the west bank of the steep river bluffs, affording a great view across to the university district. The university was pretty vast and has its own "university district" associated with it - very similar in size and feel to UW and the U-district here but with far fewer "munchkin" street kids. We did want to take the light rail and tried to take an older, but still operating, street trolley which rode high atop one of the bridges only to discover that its operating hours ended earlier than our arrival at the station. That caused us to walk yet another bridge, unfortunately also causing us to not have any real reason to take the light rail. We decided that Edmonton was, in fact, the surprise city of the trip. We had been expecting an entire city revolving around the West Edmonton Mall (which, indeed, there was in that part of town) and not much else. What we found was a sophisticated, urbane and very nicely laid out and appointed city which was as interesting, complex and friendly as any we've run across. The denizens were, as totally expected, friendly and helpful. The streetscape was interesting, alive, vibrant, and inviting. There were an unending set of streets which were set aside as pedestrian malls which ran one or two blocks, interspersed with more ordinary streets with car traffic. There were reasonably attractive high-rise offices, hotels and apartments scattered throughout the entire city. Downtown, obviously, had its own share of these high-rises, but so did three other areas about a mile or two away in another section of town. It was also evident, as it had been in Winnepeg and Saskatoon, that this was an area where the local economy seemed to be thriving and where the townsfolk had enough left over to indulge themselves with lots of urban art and street furniture.
We retired to our hotel for a bit and went out again for dinner and an evening stroll around the city because it was not only so well lit, but the neon on the many buildings and at street level was inviting. Like I said, Edmonton - not just a mall.
Jasper
The next morning we left Edmonton heading west on the Yellowhead Highway heading for Jasper and the Canadian Rockies. As soon as we got into trusty steed (1999 red Volvo S-70) I was somewhat crestfallen. The light rain which had illuminated the city so wonderfully the night before had continued and as we left town turned into a combination of rain and fog. I was hopeful, though, figuring that the Rockies would have their way with the clouds and our final miles toward Jasper would be clear. The power of positive thinking is in its ability to cast negative thoughts aside and stick with an optimistic plan, that, and it sometimes actually works. As we neared within 100 miles of Jasper and began our climb from the high plains into the foothills the rain abated and the fog lifted and what we had before us was what I was hoping for - glorious deep blue skies punctuated periodically by the white puffy clouds which linger above high mountains. Ah, the Rockies would be visible soon - and there they were - on the horizon, stretching north and south to the edge of our vision. As we neared Jasper and started the climb up and into the Rockies it got even better. The Canadian Rockies are something quite beyond expectation for anyone's first encounter. They are not quite as high, by a couple thousand feet, as the Colorado Rockies (the difference between - say - 12-point-something thousand and 14-point-something thousand) but they are so much more spectacular. The Colorado Rockies, and a lot of the Wyoming and Montana Rockies, are much more "mountain"-like - that is they are sloped evenly on all sides and have one or two pronounced or eroded faces. The Canadian Rockies, and they really begin at Glacier National Park in northwest Montana, are more like Colorado Rockies to which some force has cleaved half the mountain away. They are mountain shaped only on three of their four faces, the final face being very often a sheer slab of from three to five thousand feet of nearly-perfectly cleaved granite. They are SO primitive. Plus, they exist farther north than the Colorado Rockies and as a consequence of that and their generally-high altitude have a much more pronounced tree line. And, most of the ones in Canada have resident glaciers (as do the so-named Rockies in Montana). If one were to imagine a granite wilderness on some just-created planet the Canadian Rockies would be a good starting point.
The difference between these mountains and the mountains in Alaska is that the Canadian Rockies actually have three shades of color in the Summer and the Alaska mountains typically only have two shades, as do the Colorado Rockies. In Alaska the two shades are white and green. In Colorado the two shades are gray and green. In northwestern Montana and Alberta and British Columbia the three shades are gray, green and white. Stunning. Couple that view with the incredibly deep valleys the rivers have carved after the glaciers created the original gravity paths. By the time we arrive in the heart of Jasper we're exhausted, mostly from the exclamations of "oh, wow," or "good grief, not another wrenchingly-beautiful set of mountains." But, it's true! These are mountains which take your breath away and it doesn't really matter if the sky is blue and if the weather is pleasant. I've been in the Canadian Rockies when there was nothing but fog and they were still wrenchingly-beautiful. Weather, in fact, enhances their natural beauty because it plays out against and with them. Clouds form above and mists form in between. We park in a lot near the end of the railroad yards on the western edge of downtown Jasper and begin our trek to discover this park town. Jasper and Banff both are towns inside the park limits of Jasper and Banff Canadian National Parks. As such, one must have a job within the town to actually live in these towns. Both towns are nearly uniquely associated with the tourism which the Canadian Rockies has inspired since the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific first developed the railroad passes up to and over the Rockies in these two areas. Jasper is the further north, by slightly over 120 miles. Both towns are the home base for excursion companies, back pack and tracker concerns, guides, environmental awareness and maintenance companies and associations and, of course, for the millions who trek to each area in the summer months.
Jasper is in a very high valley and has wonderful views with mountains all around and a deep valley with coursing river on the west. The town consists of a main road which follows the rail line, with the station right in the heart of town very similar to the style found in the "Old West" in places such as central Texas, central Oklahoma, the Dakotas and eastern Montana. The town's other roads run both parallel to and intersect at angles the main road. There is about a 15-block stretch, using the typically-short blocks of the west, from the southwest to the northeast ends of town. The rest of the town roads only extend a few blocks to the northwest and then they abut against the surrounding ridges, or in the other direction, the steep valleys. Jasper is sort of like Bozeman and Banff is sort of like Jackson Hole. One town is for the true adventurer and outdoorsperson or hiker and camper and the other town is for those who really like their creature comforts but want the views and access that the adventurer has. I'm not sure of the connection or even why the coincidence, but both Bozeman and Jasper are the "northern" towns associated with their respective attractions - in the case of Bozeman it's Yellowstone and National Parks and in the case of Jasper it's Jasper National Park. And, in the case of both of them, they are connected by scenic parkways to their southerly, more tony, towns which are Jackson Hole and Banff, respectively. Grand Teton Parkway connects Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks and the Icelands Parkway connects Jasper and Banff parks.
We were only mildly dismayed to learn that the Canadian National Park employees were staging a "legal strike" and although the park was open (we didn't have to pay to get in as a result of the strike because there were no rangers at the entrance, about 50 miles east of Jasper) there were no visitor headquarters which were open nor was the Jasper museum, run by the Canadian Park Service. The same would be true of Banff we would later learn. Jasper is a gorgeous if "funky" mountain-gateway town with a wide assortment of lodging and places to eat along with the huge array of touring and outbacking companies and their associated REI-like stores. We had lunch, I believe consisting of ice-cream cones and some other munchies, and continued to explore the town for a bit and then headed out for the Icelands Parkway. Previously, I'd been in Jasper on the ViaRail TransCanadian Vistaliner and had explored the town for the 90-minute layover we had. It was a delight then and it was a delight this time. I could easily imagine myself operating a photo gallery or personal exploration service and having a little shop along Connaught Drive or Patricia Street, the two "main" parallel business streets. I could also as easily imagine myself greeting layover passengers on the ViaRail and offering them bargain images of the park and themselves against appropriate backgrounds (Photoshop'd and hard-copy printed in short order, naturally!).
Icelands Parkway
On the other hand I've got a pretty sweet setup here in West Seattle so my imaginative ramblings were just that. We head up and away into the Icelands Parkway. It's called that because the stretch of Canadian Rockies between Jasper and Banff contains a huge set of ice fields (glaciers) nearly all of which appear surprisingly and magically as one rounds each of the dozens of bends in the parkway. These are much larger than the resident glaciers on Mt. Rainier and much less dirtied by the surrounding atmosphere. Rainier's glaciers at times seem to have this overcoat of orange and brown - no doubt the result of millions of tons of exhaust and industrial gasses being released into the Puget Sound area around it. The Icelands Parkway glaciers were about as pure white as the glaciers surrounding Anchorage. It's surprising how much sunlight one mountain can capture and reflect with its glacier. The parkway trip was benefitted by outstanding weather - blue skies with clouds associated with unique and singular mountains and mist and fog associated with unique and singular deep valleys along the route. This is how the weather and land play with each other and driving through this much of that interplay is a never-ending treat in the ways by which geology and atmosphere interact and affect each other. Not to mention the sheer beauty of it all.
About midway between Jasper and Banff I had another of those amazing wildlife experiences which trips like this have accustomed me to. I rounded one bend and a thousand-feet-distant saw what definitely looked like a large dog trotting across the roadway. The parkway, I should point out, was virtually devoid of any other traffic except me. The tourist season was effectively over and there weren't the usual plethora of tour and excursion buses which ply this route earlier in the Summer. Since it's a park there are no commercial vehicles allowed on this section of park road except for local delivery vehicles between either Jasper or Banff and the very few outposts which the Canadian Park Service has up here. This animal clearly had road savvy. I'll gender-fy "him" and refer to him as a male creature. As he got to the other side of the roadway he stopped on the shoulder and turned around and intently watched as I drove closer. The speed along this parkway was 50 km/hour and I slowed considerably from that when I saw this "dog." As I got to within about a hundred-fifty feet or so I realized it was a timber wolf and slowed even further. As we drew nearer I could see that he was watching me with what looked like genuine curiosity. I didn't sense in his body language or any motion of his limbs that he was afraid or fearful. As I got to within about fifty feet we were close enough to engage in eye contact. We looked at each other as I passed by him and I got this outrageously uplifting feeling, as if somehow he had imbued me with his own sense of the wild and his complete freedom from any of the lanyards which attach themselves to me or my life. In return I offered unabashed admiration and respect and a "you look great" compliment.
And then it was more glaciers and more scarred granite cliffs off the side of even more twelve-thousand-foot mountains with even more waterfalls cascading off the sides and down into the meandering streams. I was surprised at how much water there still was this late in the season. Some of the creeks and streams we passed looked as full and raging as they must have been in the Spring melt. I later learned that it had been a very rainy and wet season in these parts of the Canadian Rockies and that most folks had considered they had been cheated out of Summer. Even more the better that we experienced outstanding and mountain-perfect weather for this passage.
Banff
As we neared the end of the parkway it became evident that we were also re-entering that portion of the Canadian Rockies which affords the commercial traveler access through the mountains. Banff is crossed by the original and now-very-freeway-like TransCanada Highway 1. It's a busy road with all the east-west Canadian truck and other commercial traffic as well as it's being the major passenger car road. We intersect Highway 1, merge into the busy freeway and take the second of two Banff exits. This is really unusual. There are no major thoroughfares bisecting Yellowstone or Glacier or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon or even Shenandoah. But, believe me, TransCanada Highway 1 between Kamloops and Calgary is about as busy as Interstate 80 between Des Moines and Omaha. It's somewhat unnerving to be virtually alone in the high Canadian Rockies with a wolf and an hour later fighting interstate traffic to merge into the exit lane. Just one more of the contrasts which this trip afforded me and one more of the representative dichotomies of life on Planet Earth in the 21st Century. It almost seemed like that scene in Star Trek where Captain Kirk is whisked off the face of Half Dome in Yosemite. Somehow I had to regain the tranquility and feeling of isolation but it would have to be all in my mind because Banff, I knew from previous experience, was a sophisticated and essentially world-class resort "city" and I was about to enter its domain.
Adam and I had been trying to find hotels in the heart of the cities we were traveling through and from Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, to Sault St. Marie, on to Thunder Bay and then Winnepeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton we had succeeded in finding decent or even downright nice hotels right in the heart of town. We had checked on whether or not the Banff Springs Hotel (one of the continent's original super-luxury resort palaces) was even in consideration. It was not, Summer rates, which were in effect until September 15, were from fourteen-hundred to twenty-one hundred dollars. It didn't even matter that they were Canadian dollars, which has been getting very strong with respect to the U.S. dollar. When Katherine and I actually did stay at the Banff Springs Hotel back in 1974 it cost us less than two hundred Canadian dollars and back then the exchange rate was seventy-two cents for one Canadian dollar. This year the exchange rate was seventy-eight cents for one Canadian dollar and as cool, sauve, tres-chic, beyond-the-pale, ne-plus-ultra as the Banff Springs Hotel really is, it was out of the question to spend nearly eleven-hundred American dollars for a night's stay.
We did splurge nevertheless. We stayed at the second-nicest hotel in Banff, the Mt. Royal Hotel, right downtown, right across the street from the Hudson Bay Company's Banff store (incorporated May 2, 1670, as their sign says) and with a bay window overlooking the street and all the walkers and visitors doing the European evening promenade. There really was an unnaturally rich mixture of Continentals visiting. Our bay window overlooked Banff Avenue between Caribou and Buffalo Streets, our two queen-sized beds were overstuffed and really, really comfortable, and the television was large screen, modern and the remote worked (they often don't). We even, because we were in one of the hotel's original sections rather than the added-on more modern section with the lobby, had our own private entrance to the hotel right on Banff Avenue, which our room key opened like it should. It was $220 Canadian, roughly $172 American. That normally would have gotten us three night's stay in the other cities but here, well, Banff is a lot of things very positive and illuminating and world-class and it's costly, it's that simple. But what the heck, we could practically fall into any restaurant in town. Plus, because it is a world-class resort town, everything stayed open until at least 11:00 pm, including the Hudson Bay Company, which was a good thing because after dinner I needed to buy some underwear and socks - we had run out of clean pairs and with just one or two more days left it seemed senseless to try and find a laundromat.
We checked in, exclaimed admiringly enough what money will buy in a hotel room and set out to explore the town and the gardens and check out the possibilities for dinner. We were way up there in the mountains and had lost some latitude so dark was going to be sooner than we had been experiencing which made our first goal that of exploration and photography. We "oohed" and "aahed" at the gardens adorning the Banff-Jasper administrative offices right at the end of Banff Avenue - a castle, really, with elegant English gardens which were, as one would expect, perfect in every way, every plant with the right flower, no flower wilted or faded, and every evergreen tree or bush perfectly manicured. And why not? This was Canada's showcase park, the town being inside the park and the park surrounding us for mountain range after mountain range. We wandered around town, through the gardens, lingering on the bridge across the Bow River and going in and through the stores. We found what turned out to be a four-star Chinese restaurant in one of those Pacific-Coast-style Asian arcades right along Banff Avenue and dined ourselves silly and then went to the Bay Company to get socks and underwear and then retired to our room to watch TV and look out the bay window. Wow! If I had money, Banff is one of those places, like Mackinac Island, where I'd spend a few weeks every year. As it is I'm truly fortunate to even be able to enjoy myself in these places for a day or even a fraction of a day.
The next morning we got up and once again treated ourselves - this time to the breakfast buffet in the main dining room of the Mt. Royal. The waitresses kept asking if we were part of this or that excursion group, because if we had been then our breakfast would have been taken care of as part of the deal. As it were breakfast cost us about $15 each. Not bad because we could have pigged out on a tremendous array of proteins, roughage, carbohydrates and fats. What we did was get some really tasty muffins and pig out on nicely crisped and perfectly done bacon. Yum...sugar and salt, my favorite.
Revelstoke
We headed west on Highway 1 with Revelstoke as our first goal. I had wanted to see what Revelstoke as a town was like because it's the homebase for more extreme skiers and snowboarders who die in avalanches than any other city on the planet. Regularly at least a dozen and more often than not as many as several dozen such extreme sports enthusiasts die in the snow-covered and glacier-covered mountains surrounding Revelstoke. As a resident of Washington, DC, I was regularly accustomed each Spring to learn through the media of one, two or, some years as many as nearly a dozen, kayakers who had been swamped by the raging Spring waters of the Potomac near Great Falls and drowned. Here in Seattle I've already become accustomed to the one, two, three or half-dozen or more mountaineers who die in falls from the same exact spots on the different faces of Mt. Rainier. I've come up with two new nicknames for Mt. Rainier (I would have been a really good native American, I can track, I can see the subtleties in the world around me, I can smell and hear other creatures, and I can name something because of what it does to me). The first is one I coined last Winter and which made even more sense this past Spring as even more people fell from its slopes - and that nickname is Death Mountain. More recently, in the pale atmospheric haze which becomes the air around Puget Sound in the Summer, I've nicknamed Rainier "Ghost Mountain." There's this great effect which occurs right after sunset where the atmosphere and the forested and snow-covered sides of Mt. Rainier become the same color which is a very faint and pale blue-gray. Above this, at the glacier-level and still being illuminated by the lingering twilight, hovers this white and glowing tinier mountain, literally the top two-or-three-thousand feet of the fourteen-thousand-foot volcano. The mountain, then, becomes a ghost hovering above its corporeal self. Wonderful mountain, by the way, a source of constant delight and visual enlightenment.
Point being that I wanted to see what sort of town hosted these adventurers, quite a number of whom would never have that next morning's coffee or that same evening's dinner. We arrived on a Sunday morning at about 9:00 and drove all around the town. It's about a square mile and sits right on the upper reaches of the Columbia River. It's obviously flat right in town but the town, like Missoula, Montana, is surrounded by these great foothills and early stages of the Canadian Rockies on the west front. In fact, for all practical purposes the town sits at the confluence of the North Cascades, the Canadian Rockies, and the Coast Range. Of course, the actual mountain ranges have more localized names because they are ranges associated with these larger geological features. We drove into the heart of town, it's two north-south parallel streets serving as the ladder sides for a set of rungs running about a third of a mile. It looked like a combination resort, scientific study home base, outfitting and engineering research and manufacturing, and escape town. There was evidence of long habitation in some of the neighborhoods, looking like some of those in Montana or Wyoming with original hundred-year-old houses still being used quite handily. There was also evidence of software development, probably for what looked like a seismic and glacier research community. In short, it looked like a prosperous town in a delightful location. We found what we were looking for - the local coffee shop which bakes its own scones and went inside, found a den area which suited us as passers-through, got our scones and cappuccinos and sat down to watch the Sunday-morning traffic in a tony little coffee house in the town which claims more avalanche extreme sport deaths than any other. And then it was back on the road this time to find Alberta 97, which would take us down through the "Sunshine Valley," which is the valley that Okanagan Lake sits in.
Okanagan Lake & Sunshine Valley
Highway 1, the TransCanada, intercepts Lake Okanagan at the northern end of its 90 mile length. It's another of the hundreds of glacier-carved lakes between mountains in British Columbia, Alberta, Montana and Washington. Highway 97 meanders from one side to the other the length of the lake because these kinds of lakes can get very narrow and often have what is almost a land-bridge here and there. The first town of consequence is Kelowna, which turns out to be quite the local money-making community. In addition to being a first rate lake resort town (it had a lot of the feel of the area around the eastern end of Green Lake here in Seattle, including the tony shops and restaurants), it also appeared to be the home town for this region of British Columbia's health and banking and communications communities. It also had a lot of lumber-related industries (think of pre-fab log cabins and then think of about a dozen companies making these, many adjacent to each other on the highway). And, like every community west of the Mississippi which still has native tribal members, it had a booming casino industry. We stopped to watch the kite-skiers being towed across the lake and got hot dogs and french fries and soft drinks at a concession right on the lakeside boardwalk right across from what looked like the northern edition of Rodeo Drive. There were hundreds of folks out walking on the lakeside path. It was really a busy recreational weekend here in Kelowna right about midway along the great Okanagan Lake. Finishing our lunch, we got back in the car and headed south for Washington State. Along the way it began to dawn on us that the nickname "Sunshine Valley" and the region around us was British Columbia's wine country. It looked like a replica of Sonoma County with vineyards clinging to the banks of the lake and up along the hills which ringed the lake (Sonoma has rivers but the visual effect remained the same). By the time we were about halfway from Kelowna to the U.S. border we had passed no less than 50 vineyards and their wineries. Names which I wouldn't remember but all family names, many of them combinations of Western and Eastern surnames and all of them having at least a respectable wine drinking house. Another treat of discovery. I didn't even know that BC had a wine industry - though it makes perfect sense. And here I am cruising through the thick of the vine.
We traveled to the end of the lake, passing a resort town about every 15 miles or so, wherever there was a significant bend on this or the other shoreline of the lake - just enough to allow a resort town to sit on a peninsula jutting out into the lake. Very pretty. Very busy, too. Lots of people and lots of timber business and lots of wine business. Enough for glass factories and graphics shops and fancy printing outfits, not to mention specialty crating and shipping concerns. All of which require insurers and bankers. You get the picture - productive place with booming modern economy, again set in an outstanding natural venue of mountains and water with a temperate clime, too.
North Cascades Highway
The entry back into the U.S. was as uneventful and prosaic as the entry into Canada days earlier. Either we are being profiled and I'm so benign as to be ignored or we've been exceptionally lucky our last dozen trips across the border. I've never had so much as an eyebrow raised on me by either American or Canadian border agents. Anyway, it did feel good to be back on native turf again and we were going to head west as soon as we intersected Washington State Highway 20 - the North Cascades Highway. We'd been in the mountains for part of the day before, all of today and it was going to continue through nightfall. I've wanted to travel any part of Highway 20 since I moved out here and in that time everyone has been mentioning the Skagit Valley - which Highway 20 runs straight through - as being where they wanted to buy land and escape. Even though it was getting dark I was beginning to see why all the fuss. This is one gorgeous highway, the Cascades I already knew were outstanding mountains, craggy, forested, many with tops covered still in the Summer with snow, and the home range for the volcanoes of the Pacific Coast. Highway 20, even more than Highway 2 and even much more than Interstate 90 crosses the Cascades dead-on. These are north-south running ranges and though Interstate 90 is one of the most scenic highways on the continent, the old US Highway 2 is even better because it was engineered even longer ago and retains a lot of its original switch-back character. Highway 20 goes those other two one better - it's a state highway and is even narrower and cuts through a lesser explored region in a much lower population density. Besides which, it virtually straddles the two countries. We zoom down the valley to Burlington and get on Interstate 5, the Pacific Coast's version of I-95 and just as busy and ill-kept.
In a short hour we're home, across the West Seattle Bridge and unpacking the car. Ah, home again. It felt very, very good to be home - not because I missed it so much as because I had seen too much in the previous three weeks and my mind was exhausted processing all those views, all those encounters, all those city grids and highway systems, all that currency conversion, all the complexities of my extended family reunion, all the living out of a suitcase - even if it was a well-appointed and equipped suitcase. And, I'd delivered my last living-at-home son back to his home, safely and in one piece. End of yet another grand adventure. I'd accrued upwards of two gigabytes of image data and seen so many things new to me. It was a wonderful trip.
Pictures and other visual memorabilia of this saga will be forthcoming. And, for those who have made it this far, thanks for the patience and attention. Next entry will be within a few days and may be among these topics: Thoughts about Seattle after a year's residence; a re-found journal entry from 1988 (yeah, I've been "blogging" for a long, long time - this one's even an original electronic posting from the days of x.400 systems and VAXmail and BBS's which is to say pre-internet). In the mean time, my life has become complicated again - Seattle does that to innocent bystanders.
Chas
Posted: Thu - September 23, 2004 at 02:25 AM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM