Wednesday August 19

We were up early and on the road by 8:30 am. It was a beautiful, sunny day with blue cloudless skies, and warm temperatures. When we left Hinton, the Rockies rose up in front of us like a solid wall of granite. We passed a group of mountain sheep and took tons of pictures. By the time we reached Jasper, we were surrounded by high, grey mountains, richly vegetated with fir trees three quarters of the way up. We took a quick walk around Jasper and enjoyed its relaxed atmosphere and beautiful location. The drive down Highway 93 to Lake Louise was truly stunning and quite compares with other mountain ranges in the world. I think it is the vastness of the Rockies that consumes you. The mountains are all around, and the snow peaks peep up above the grey granite rock and make you shiver. The lakes are a beautiful aquamarine colour, but freezing cold, and I doubt you would last too long in them. In fact, they say it would only be minutes before you died of hypothermia if you fell into some of the rapids and waterfalls. We stopped at the Athabasca Falls and saw the 23-metre waterfall powering over the rocks and into the swirling river below. It is said to have the most powerful flow anywhere in the mountain parks. We drove down the Icefields Parkway and saw the Columbia Icefields; I must admit to being a little disappointed, but then you can only see 3 of the 7 icefields from the road. They looked grey and dirty and crawling with caterpillar-like sight-seeing vehicles. We stopped at lookouts for the high peaks and the glaciers, and amazed at the intense aqua colour of Peyto Lake and Bow Lake. Passing through all the splendour makes you realize just how insignificant humans are in the natural world, and yet at the same time, we can do so much harm. We stopped at Lake Louise and took too many pictures; then drove on to Banff where we arrived around 7:30 pm. Its a fun town, established, commercialized, but nonetheless alive. Our hostel is about a 5 minute walk from all the shops and restaurants which is perfect and we had a great dinner before walking back over the bridge for the night. When we arrived, before we even got our stuff out of the car, we saw a deer grazing along the edge of the river about 10 feet from the car. Later, the same deer had bedded down for the night under a tree in the garden of the hostel. How neat is that!