This is the sixth 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.
Our morning at the campground was pretty uneventful: we just packed up and got ourselves ready, and then rode the mile or so back to the Icefields Visitor Centre — I wasn’t kidding about the quality of food there! We ate there again, and stocked up on sandwiches for dinner.
This was our one real “white-knuckle ride,” as we came down from Sunwapta Pass to the valley of the North Saskatchewan. It really wasn’t too crazy, but it was steep enough to be intimidating, steep enough that we had to ride our brakes all the way down, and long enough that we had to stop several times to let our brakes cool. (We could actually smell our brakes, and the brakes of the cars going by, overheating.) Luckily, once again there were pull-offs and lookouts we could use to catch a break. The shoulder was pretty ample too, though there was one spot where a camper-van going the opposite direction broke down — it was parked mostly on the opposite shoulder, but stuck out into traffic, and the driver was under the van with his legs even further into traffic… The guy had safety cones out, but this was also Canada Day and the road was super busy, and with the northbound cars going around him and the southbound cars moving over and encroaching on our shoulder, things got pretty tight for a hot minute.
We finally got down the steep part to the “big bend,” where the road doubles back in a series of 90 and 180 degree turns, and where we stopped to explore a beautiful stream that turned out to be the North Saskatchewan River. We weren’t done or even all the way down, but the craziest part of our day was over.
When we got to the Rampart Creek Campground, there was a ranger in her truck at the entrance, who took one look at me and exclaimed “You look warm!” (I was pretty sunburned.) She gave us advice for the best remaining walk-in campsites, and we found the spots and set up camp in a sudden, and thankfully very short, hailstorm. We took opportunities to wash bodies and clothes in Rampart Creek, which was just a short hike down the trail from our site, then we ate our dinner and just enjoyed the scenery. (The plants and soil surface reminded me very much of Snowshoe, West Virginia, by the way, the same pines and soft, lumpy peat moss. The mountains were a bit bigger here…)
The ranger eventually stopped back and talked with us, asking about our trip so far and reminiscing about when she cycled across Canada as a young woman. She also said she’d make sure we would have a campsite available at the next campground — sweet!
