This is the fourth in a series of posts about our bicycling trip down the Icefield Parkway, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.
At The Hostel
Our night at Athabasca Falls was pretty uneventful, aside from one midnight incident when some poor dad (who probably spent the previous half hour lecturing his teenage kids about being quiet before entering the dorm) accidentally dropped a pocketful of change on the floor. It was like an alarm went off, and there we were all in our bunks, suddenly awakened and stifling our laughter while he frantically tried to pick up the coins in his underwear… He got things back under control quickly enough — he probably just left the coins there until morning — and the rest of the night passed quietly.
We had another bit of excitement in the morning though, when one of the other guests tried to cook some bacon by baking it in the oven — only they used plastic “baking trays!” After a few minutes you could smell a weird plastic smell in the common room, and then it was overwhelming and nasty smoke was starting to come out of the oven.
Cue our lovely and unflappable hostel manager — she swooped in from who-knows-where, got the trays out the back door and into the fire pit, and managed to get all the windows and doors open before the smoke got too bad, all while reassuring the cook it wasn’t her fault, really, the trays had been put away in the wrong place by the last people to use them and it was an understandable mistake. (The poor woman was pretty embarrassed.) Things were soon back to normal, and we were all chatting like old friends now that the ice had been broken.
Here are some parting shots by the way, a few photos I took of the common room before we left:
(Hodgepodge Lodge, right?)
Outside it was overcast, and drizzly at times, but the weather was nowhere near as bad as the original forecast. We cooked and ate our breakfast, sitting with Coin Guy from the night before, who — with the help of an enormous pile of maps and guidebooks — was planning the next leg of his trip, and then we packed our stuff and prepared to leave.
On The Road Again
This was the second-longest leg of our trip by mileage, and our first real day on the Icefields Parkway proper. This road follows the valleys of the Athabasca River, the Sunwapta River, the North Sasketchewan River, and so on southward; today we would follow the Athabasca River (upstream) and then on up the Sunwapta. You can see the basic gist of it in the map above.
For some reason I didn’t take as many pictures this day, but this was the day that the incredible beauty all around really started to seep into me. We were riding just on the edge of the foul weather following us from Jasper, every view was beyond dramatic, and every mountain had its ragged cloud blowing off the top like a flag in the wind. Everywhere you looked, and changing every second, was incredible beauty.
Our lunch break was at a restaurant just a short hike from Sunwapta Falls, so after we ate we walked up to check it out. This wasn’t as spectacular as Athabasca Falls, but it was still pretty cool, and you could also get closer to the water, which was actually kind of intimidating.
But while we were eating lunch and exploring the falls, the drizzly weather finally caught up with us, and we had to ride in the wet for a while until we got ahead of it again. Here’s my last picture before we got to the end of the day’s ride, Anne riding off into the rainy, elk-infested distance:
Now that I think about it, that might be why I didn’t take so many pictures — we were trying to outrace the weather…
Beauty Creek Hostel
We got to the end of our day at Beauty Creek Hostel, which was a smaller (and seemingly more primitive) version of the one at Athabasca Falls: neither had running water, and both had potable water in containers, but at Beauty Creek we got our non-potable water from the Sunwapta river out back, which we boiled for dishwashing. I didn’t mind, the views out back were spectacular:
The manager at Beauty Creek was a gruff guy named Grant, who had a beer ready for every person who arrived under their own power. He gave out quite a few beers that night — besides us, there was a trio of Frenchmen (one originally French-Canadian) cycling to Mexico, and another guy, an ultra-endurance athlete, doing some kind of long distance training ride.
There were also two German women at the hostel, traveling by car; we’d seen them at the hostel at Athabasca Falls too, so it was a bit of a reunion to see them here. (One of them was an English teacher in Germany, and had been an exchange student in Alberta years before, and the two of them were apparently wild about board games — the hostels were all fully stocked with games of every description.) It got pretty crowded and sociable in that common room, and just as I left to crash for the evening, the French riders and the German women were beginning an epic game of Power Yahtzee…
