Our Trip West - May 16 - May 19

On Friday, we went on a River Safari. This was a rather expensive boat ride that offered the opportunity to see bears and other wildlife. However, since it was so early in the season, there weren't really that many bears around, so we did not see any bears, or any wildlife for that matter. However, we did get a longer tour than usual, and our guides were from New Zealand, so they had awesome accents :).

We also saw some spectacular views, as it was a bright sunny day. After the boat tour, we continued our north-easterly trek towards the Alberta border.


Along the way, we passed by a mountain named in memory of Terry Fox - Mt. Terry Fox. There's a lookout with a picnic area for this mountain.

Mt. Terry Fox - 1


Mt. Terry Fox - 2


Mt. Terry Fox - 3


At the lookout there were also signs indicating that you could hike up Mt. Terry Fox - all in all a 30 km trip return, but the trek to the first lookout was a more manageable 2 or 3 km, so Rob and I thought we would give that a try. We first had to drive to the base of the hiking trail, and that took some doing. It was an unkept road that kept splitting, so we had to keep guessing which way to turn. And at one point, a fallen tree lay across the road - there was no way our RV would fit underneath it. However, our camping gear came to the rescue! I had packed our hatchet, since I thought we might have a campfire one night. We never did have a campfire, but we used the hatchet. (It would have been a long trip down back down that hill in reverse otherwise!)




Once Rob removed the tree, we did find the base of the hiking trail. However, in the end we decided not to do the hike - it was very remote, it was bear country, and no one in the whole world knew we were there - it seemed to risky to me, so we didn't go. (Okay, okay, I wimped out :) )

Back on the main highway, we continued our journey, and finally found Mt. Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. An impressive sight it is, and looking back, we're really glad for the beautiful weather we had that day.



Rob took these pictures through his binoculars.


This is a glacier on the mountain, and that will be meters and meters of snow.


That night, we stayed in a KOA campground in Hinton, Alberta. The road going through Jasper National Park apparently has a lot of wildlife crossing, and we did see this elk.


This is one more rather unique peak we saw along the way.


The KOA in Hinton was another RV parking lot, and since it was the Friday of the Victoria Day long weekend, the park was quite full. That was not so pleasant - but were the bathrooms ever clean! We went grocery shopping again that evening, to a mall not far from the campground. Many of the stores in the mall were already closed for the night, which was a bit strange - really only the Wal-mart and the grocery store were open.

On Saturday, we went to West Edmonton Mall. For all the hype about it, it really is just an enormous mall with an amusement park and a water park on the ends of it. It also had some sea life displays, including a pool with some sea lions, and sea lion shows a few times a day. We did watch that - it was neat.

However, since it was a Saturday, the mall was very, very busy. All we bought was ice cream!

After we left the mall, we went to downtown Edmonton, to find Rexall Place, home of the Edmonton Oilers.

Then, we went to our campsite for the night, for supper, laundry, and bed.

Here's Rob driving - he did all the driving with the exception of a few km's early on the trip. I found the vehicle quite large, and really didn't like driving it.

On Sunday, we attended the services at the Edmonton URC. This church is in a residential neighbourhood, but we found it without difficulty. Edmonton does name/number their streets just like Calgary, but the church was easier to find than Calgary FRC had been the week before. For lunch we visited Steve & JJ, who moved out to Edmonton last summer. It was really nice to see them again - we joke together that we are their replacements at LWRC, since Rob was voted in as deacon to replace Steve and I took over the bookkeeping duties from JJ. Thank you for the visit, Steve & JJ & family - we wish you God's blessings in Edmonton.

Sunday night we stayed in the same park again, and Monday morning the adventures began again!

Our plans for the week were to spend time in the National Parks - mostly Banff and Jasper, and we stuck to our plans. We did re-arrange our activities a bit in hopes for better weather "tomorrow" but the weather wasn't great all week - cloudy every day, with a fair bit of rain. However, we still had an enjoyable time.

On Monday, we headed for Jasper National Park, taking the scenic route. We again saw a number of these oil drilling operations.

This is Abraham Lake resevoir, clearly man-made, but the green water was pretty - lots of "rock flour" colouring the water, and we did see the neat reflections of the mountains in the water.


We saw more wildlife - this time a small herd of bighorn sheep.


Even in the cloudy weather, the scenery is still beautiful, but in a different way.


We made a stop at the Columbia Icefields and the Athabasca glacier. This is a glacier that is reachable by vehicle, and you can take a tour out onto the glacier. The Athabasca glacier is about 300m deep, and is fed from the Columbia icefields, being only one of many glaciers fed by that icefield.


The SnoCoach that you ride out to the glacier. There's 23 of these in the world, and 22 of them are at the Icefield. As part of this tour, we drover over the steepest gravel hill used for passenger travel - an 18% grade, 32degrees.



That night we stayed in a campground within the national park and this was a real campground. The campsites were actually in a forest, and you had some privacy from your neighbours. Of course, we brought plenty of attention to ourselves when the smoke alarm went off in the RV - but seriously, I was just boiling water! That alarm actually went off several times over the next few days, mostly when I was boiling water, so it seemed to be rather sensitive about something.

We saw a lot of elk in the campground, just wandering around. Signs everywhere warned us to be careful, as mothers with their young could be quite protective, and it was the time of year that baby elk are born. We didn't see any baby elk though.

From our campsite we could see the peak of The Whistlers, this is the mountain that the Jasper Tramway was on. Since the weather wasn't great, we watched this peak quite carefully - since didn't figure it would be worthwhile to go up if we couldn't see the peak from the bottom! However, as darkness fell on Monday night, we could still see it.