Canada!

750 miles
12 hours on the road

Day two of the drive was probably the most beautiful drive I’ve ever done. I was on the road at 5 and heading north on I-15 towards the Canadian boarder and got across with out even having to get out of the car. Gotta love drive through customs.

What I didn’t love some much is that the speed limit on all highways in Canada is 100km (60 mph), which felt ridiculously slow after a day of Montana and North Dakota speed limits of 75 mph. Oh well. So I headed up to Calgary through the ever so flat southern Alberta and from there turned West toward Canmore to head into the Parks.

Driving through Banff and Jasper National Parks was amazing. There simply aren’t words. The whole approach to the mountains you are just sitting there with your mouth open and being so excited that land can rise this high after driving through the Midwest. I stopped in Lake Louise for gas (which is 1.10 a liter) and drove up to the Lake. Unfortunately it was starting to snow so the view of the mountains wasn’t that great and the lake was still very frozen. (I had heard that the lake is this amazing color of blue that I had to see). I thought to myself that I might have to stop again in August on my way home and try to see it, but then remembered that in August this place would be swarmed with tourists (such as myself)/ So I just enjoyed the view I had from bench, ate an apple and got back in the car.

The drive to Jasper from Lake Louise is along the Ice Fields parkway. Again, it was snowing so the first half of the drive there wasn’t much to see, but the snow broke up and if you looked around there was snow covered mountains with blue ice peaking out everywhere. It’s still full on winter here, so you can still see all the avalanche slides on the sides of the mountains.

I was making pretty good time, so I stopped just before Jasper at Athabasca Falls. The Athabasca River flows off of the Columbia Ice Field (one of the biggest in the world) and I read a sign somewhere that it feeds into three oceans. (I have my doubts though… Artic, Pacific, and……? If anyone knows what the third ocean is please let me know) Anyway, the falls were swamped with people but still worth getting out of the car to hike around and look at. While I was at the falls I met a man from Edmonton who was painting pictures of the river and mountains and said I had a strange accent and asked where I was from (eh). I told him I was driving from Minnesota to Alaska and he said that sounded like a lot of fun (eh) and asked which highway I was driving on (eh). I said I was going to take the Alaska Highway up. He told me that the best drive was to take the Alaska highway north and then to take the other highway down the coast of British Columbia on the way back (eh). But that I should know that once I got north of Hinton all I would see for a while was a lot of trees (eh). His paintings were beautiful and I wished I could have gotten one, but sadly I had only American Dollars. So I thanked him and headed back to the car to get to Jasper.

Scott met me in downtown Jasper when I got there and we tooled around the city for a little while. There was this great trail across the river from town that we hiked up and from there you could see the whole town and the surrounding area. It was absolutely beautiful. Scott pointed out to me all the different trails around the town and peaks that you could ski and climb. Also, we hiked past some huge big horn sheep that didn’t even care one lick that we were there. Literally we walked past a group of them with only about 5 feet between us and them and just kept munching on the grass. Scott made some comment about the bizarre “city sheep” and we kept hiking.

Today is my day off, so Scott and I are going to head into Jasper and do some hiking and check out the town a bit more before I have to head off again in the morning to keep going north.