I’ve been feeling slightly bad since I feel like I left this blog lingering on a cranky note and then disappeared. (Which is in part cuz I’ve been fully off the grid and in part because the town of Jasper doesn’t seem to believe in wifi so I couldn’t get back even when I was in a town;)
In the meantime I’ve schemed many posts that I will probably never write, but for those of you following along at home (hi, Mom!:) suffice it to say that the Monday back when I last wrote was definitely the worst smoke day, and since then it has been soooo soo good out here.
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(Hector Lake deserves its own whole post cuz it was definitely the smoke and morale turning point and also involved a ridiculous river ford to get the the totally empty and amazing waterfront campsite)
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(Peyto Lake on a cloudy morning)
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(Probably my favorite hike of the whole trip: I thought I was going to Helen Lake but ended up going beyond to climb Cirque Peak too. It was so fricken beautiful up there I actually cried)
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(Happiest of stasias in the mountains;)
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I had basically 6 full days to get from Lake Louise to Jasper on the Icefield Parkway, which felt like a lot of days to cover 150 or so miles but ended up being perfect since it gave me lots of time to stop and hike (or play by/in lakes, etc etc:) That road is outrageous. I would spend an hour or two biking toward this giant massif of mountains in the distance, and then get there, and bike past them for an hour or two, and there were always just more and more and more mountains behind. So, so, so many mountains.
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(And so many lakes!!)
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(And never too far from a crazy blue/green glacial river. This is the Saskatchewan River, which I was excited later to take a hike where I could see into its glacier inception)
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(Speaking of glacier inception, here’s the Athabasca Glacier, source of the amazing Athabasca River that I followed for several days after this)
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(And have I mentioned alpine meadows of my favorite flowers?? <3)
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And then I got to Jasper and my favorite sweet James arrived, after an extremely long solo drive from Portland, with all manner of food resupply for us to play for another week in the mountains together:) (Let’s all appreciate that I’d said it would he helpful if we had a few nights’ worth of backcountry dinners, and James fricken made chili and curry from scratch and dehydrated it for us. What a guy:)
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(Mountain us-es!:) From near a backcountry hut maintained by the Alpine Club of Canada that was a very very long though extremely beautiful 18.5 miles to get to. It was so fricken amazing to be there for two nights)
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(Find our mountain hut!:) Hint: it’s on the far side of the lake:)
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So now we’re back at the hostel in Lake Louise and have showered and slept in (and eaten a lot of food, heh) and we’re ready for more adventure on our slow way back to Portland:) It’s been 31 days of bike adventure for me and now halfway into a week of joint adventure with James and it is all so, so good:)