Day 12 - Whiteout

As we pulled out of the car park of the Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge this morning, having checked out of our fourth hotel, Sandra got that blasted sat nav out and started to program in "Jasper". I said to her, "we don't need that today, it's a totally straight road from here to Jasper". Laughing, she put the sat nav away, and we set off.

40 minutes past Lake Louise I began to suspect that something was wrong. The "Welcome to British Columbia" sign a number of miles back should have given me a clue, but I was so convinced that there was only one route out of Canmore that I'd ignored it. It was the signs counting down the number of miles to Golden that got me wondering. We stopped at a place called Field for a pee break, then continued on. "Revelstoke" said another sign... Revelstoke... hmmm... Revelstoke is in BC... as is Golden... hmmm... I asked Sandra to get a map out and have a look. She found Field down Highway 1, inside British Columbia, heading west. The route to Jasper, Highway 93, was some miles back. We were in Yoho National Park, BC. Yoho indeed. Jeff and I had talked a little about nipping into BC or Saskatchewan, just to say we'd been in two Canadian provinces. I hadn't really planned on it, but, well, we've done it now, and it feels pretty good!

It put about an extra 90 minutes onto our day. Nuisance or fortunate? Read on to find out.

We made our way back to Highway 93 as the clouds rolled back in. The weather forecast had said it was going to be cloudy and rainy today. So far we'd had rain and then brilliant sunshine, but the rain was coming back.

Our first few miles up the Ice Field Parkway were dark and sullen. The guide book recommended stopping at Bow Lake and then later at Peyto Lake for photo opportunities. At Bow Lake it started sleeting, so we moved on. We pulled into the car park at Peyto Lake hoping the sleet would stop. Instead it turned into snow. I've never been on a summer holiday when it snowed before. As we sat and ate our sandwiches, it started thundering. Snow and thunder, another first. We decided to give Peyto Lake a miss.

A little disappointed, we moved on. Our true goal was the Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Ice Field. We decided that, if the weather was still pants, we'd drive on past it, and come back again tomorrow, when the forecast was for better weather. However, as we drove on, the sun broke through again. We even stopped a few times for r-sum photo opportunities. It was looking good.

When we got to the Glacier, the visibility was pretty good. I thought we'd have an age to wait (the Ice Field Centre is compared, in our guide book, to an airport departure lounge), but we bought our tickets and were told it was only 30 minutes until the next departure. Just time to buy a toque and a scarf from the gift shop! (For the uninitiated, a toque - pronounced "took" - is a Canadian woolly bob-hat.)

We stood at our "departure gate", waiting to get on board the coach that would take us to the glacier where we would board one of the odd-looking Ice Field Explorer vehicles. A woman in the queue in front of me remarked upon my toque, sarcastically asking if she could borrow it. When it started hailing a few minutes later, and I was all warm and toasty, I could see her eating her words.

We were dropped off at a little shelter, and herded onto one of the gigantic Ice Field Explorer buses. This thing then drove down the most ludicrous incline I've ever seen (37 degrees, we were told), and then set off at 18 mph for the glacier itself.

In all the brochures, you see a picture of a solitary red and white huge-wheeled bus parked on a brilliant white glacier with a beautiful blue sky as backdrop. When we parked up, alongside about another 5 buses of all colours, it was snowing again. You couldn't see more than a few tens of yards. We off-loaded, and took a few gratuitous pictures of each other, before Sandra retired, along with many others, back to the bus. I stayed outside as long as I could, but man alive it was cold, and not long later I went back inside myself. I only went back outside a few minutes later because someone said the snow was lifting. Granted, you could just about make out the side of the mountain nearby, but then the snow came back harder so I gave up.

Disappointing? A little. But then, how many other people have stood on a glacier in the middle of summer and been snowed on? It's an experience I'll never forget.

We then continued our drive onto Jasper. The sat nav (back in service after my earlier fateful cockiness) told us we had about an hour or so still to drive. Coming up over a ridge, another of those gaggles of cars by the side of the road. I said to Sandra, "are we stopping?", she said, "yes!". I pulled in, and we both looked to the right, into the trees... elk? Moose? Bear? Deer? And then, Sandra's cry, "it's a bear, it's a bear!!" And sure enough it was, a black bear, just visible through the trees, ambling along so slowly... and yet still too fast for either of us to get a picture of it. I scrambled out of the car with my video camera, keeping H between myself and the bear, even though it was a good 100 feet or more away. Too late, it had vanished into the forest.

Both of us knew we'd seen a bear, against all odds, and it made the day special. We hadn't been able to photograph it, and that kinda jarred, but we'd seen one, and that's what mattered. It made up for the snow and sleet through the Ice Field Parkway.

Further on, the sat nav instructed us to turn left off the main highway, onto 93A instead of 93. I agreed reluctantly, then cursed as I realised it was taking us down some crazy country road. "Why, oh WHY is she taking us down here?" I asked. Sandra made some joke about there being a bear round the next corner. I was still laughing cynically when we rounded the next corner, and there was a bear. I'm not joking, that's how it happened.

I tried to put my foot on the clutch, but of course H is an automatic and doesn't have a clutch, so I just succeeded in applying the parking brake. The bear was just scrambling down a rise about 40 feet from us. I pulled into the side of the road (there was nothing behind us at all, and never was during the encounter), trying to grab my video camera at the same time as stop H a safe distance from the bear without startling it.

The bear - it was a black bear, about 5 feet long I guess - got to the bottom of the rise and slowly ambled (there is no other word for it) across the road. It seemed completely oblivious to us. It foraged a little in the undergrowth on our side of the road while I tried to video it and Sandra tried to photograph it through the windscreen (I'd already told her in no circumstances was she to wind the passenger side window down!). Two of the better pictures are on the Flickr site. The bear vanished behind a bush, and I waited a little while, then eased H forward. The last we saw of the bear was its back, about 10 feet away, before it disappeared down the incline.

We were both shaking a little, and so pleased that this was our bear, and not shared by other road users. Weatherwise the day hadn't gone as we'd hoped, but the few tens of seconds we'd shared on that back road with that black bear more than made up for it.

When we checked into our hotel room about 40 minutes later, and saw how huge it was (two double beds, I mean, come on), we both agreed it was just icing on the cake of another fun day's adventuring in Alberta. Ah gosh, I even picked Sandra up and swung her around.

Wonder what delights tomorrow will bring...