August 30 The road from Jasper to Lake Louise

The road from Jasper to Lake Louise is one of the most spectacular mountain drives you could possibly take. Impossibly steep mountains, rushing mountain rivers, glaciers, ice fields and azure blue lakes. I’m sure this is so as about 10% of the time we got glimpses of the incredible scenery. Unfortunately, on this fine summer day we had low clouds, rain, snow and intermittent fog. We did get a couple of breaks, at our stop at the Columbia Ice field on the Athabasca glacier it was mostly cloud free and we got a few pics of the glacier. We were able to see a few of the mountain tops between the cloud cover. The road is about 150 miles between Jasper and Lake Louise and while we saw quit a few spectacular vistas I know we missed a lot.


Tonight we are in a huge national park RV park, over 200 sites. We were warned that this is grizzly bear country and to keep our campsite especially clean. The tenting portion of this park is surrounded by an electric fence to keep the bears from harassing the campers. We are assured that the 7000 volts will only cause temporary damage to errant campers and that they normally don’t try to span the fence a second time.

We are hoping for better weather tomorrow so that we might go canoeing. In one of the brochures it mentions traditional Canadian lake water sports, canoeing and ice skating…. Swimming is definitely not an option.

In large national campgrounds they have evening presentations about the parks, the wild life and natural history. We have been to two of these. They are not what I expected to see from my experience at Yellowstone or Yosemite which were pretty formal lectures with a speaker, usually a naturalist, and slides. In Canada the presenters are young park employees, they didn’t identify themselves as park naturalists. Their presentations were “homemade” using homemade props, puppets and a few slides’ and they always seem to enlist “volunteers” from the audience. One presentation was a takeoff from the TV show “Survivors” where the animals in the park joined teams and voted a few of the animals off the park as they could no longer “survive. The other presentation was performed by a single very charming young lady, who ”took” us in her time machine to various times in the park, where she changed into period costume and discussed animal management practices from the 1900s, 1960s to now. It was all very simple, but creative and informative. I’m sure the kids that do these presentations, have other real jobs and that these performances are something they do for fun and in an attempt to educate the public to respect the parks and the animals that live here.