The Other Don Kelly

This is the fifth 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.

We got up, ate breakfast and packed our bikes, and started on our way. This would be our shortest day, but since the day featured a real stinker of a climb, we figured it would work out in terms of effort.

Sunwapta Pass

The hill we had to climb was the front part of the Sunwapta Pass, a saddle between Mount Athabasca and Nigel Peak; it’s what separates the Sunwapta River valley from the valley of the North Sasketchewan River. The worst part of it had us climbing about a thousand feet in just under two miles — luckily it also had several parking areas and overlooks we used to catch our breath — and then we were up in the pass, though it still kept climbing for a bit. We would essentially be up in the pass until tomorrow’s big downhill.

This is the area where the Columbia Icefield is most accessible. The first crest had a tourist “cliffside walk,” where we celebrated our ascent; then came a small downhill, and then we climbed again, and finally we came around a bend and were hit with an icy wind, and the Athabasca Glacier was there to our right. This glacier is a sort of tongue sticking out of the Icefield past Mount Athabasca, and is the source of our friend the Athabasca River. You could get tours of the glacier in special vehicles, like all-terrain buses, which took you out to where you could hike around. We could see the vehicles up on the glacier — they looked like ants in the distance.

This was at the Columbia Icefield Visitor Centre, our lunch stop, where we ate in the cafeteria. Maybe it was the spectacular view, or maybe it was all the exertion in that fresh cold mountain air, but the food there was especially delicious…

Columbia Icefields Campground

Unlike the last two nights, we had no reservations for this night’s lodging. Jasper and Banff National Parks were known to be busy in the summer, and since we were just coming into the Canada Day Weekend, likely the busiest part of the busy season, we were worried about being able to find a place for the night, but just past the Icefield Centre were two campsites — no reservations, first come first served. It was still early in the day, so we hoped to find a campsite at one of them.

We were in luck. The first campsite had plenty of openings, including several beautiful, secluded, walk-in only sites, which were just a bit down a trail and across a small creek from the rest of the place. Julie took one spot, and we took the one next door, and our neighbor turned out to be another rider we’d seen on the road. Sweet!

We were now up in (or just on the edge of) the Icefields, and finally camping for real. It was time to start practicing bear discipline: no unattended food at our campsite (there were special bear-proof lockers in the main camp), and our bear spray always ready just outside the tents. I’m not sure how serious we needed to be, our car-camping neighbors were there with their dogs, and grilling steaks without much apparent concern, but we at least were in deadly earnest. Dinner and cleanup (far from our tents), then a walk around the campsite, and then bed.

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…

This is the third 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.

My lodging for the night was a bunk in the men’s dorm at the hostel. I got up early and bumped into Anne downstairs — she and Julie had bunks in a women’s dorm — and the two of us finished getting our bikes together. Since the afternoon was supposed to be rainy (and Wednesday’s weather might even be a “wintry mix” closer to town) we hoped for a relatively early start, but it wasn’t meant to be.

The bikes were scheduled for a quick check at a local shop, but the mechanic there was obsessive and took forever working on them, fixing what wasn’t broke and even trying to clean the frames. But we were already committed to the bike check, and now we were stuck in town while the weather deteriorated.

After a long and frustrating delay, we finally hit the road. The rain had started, but it wasn’t really all that bad (we did get a bit chilled whenever we went downhill). Our route left town southbound on Highway 93, then after a few miles we turned right onto 93A, the “old road” as we heard it called. Highway 93A was in really good shape (as were almost all the Canadian roads), but it was fairly remote — it went south of the main road, and was hillier and less direct, and it did not get a lot of traffic. We started to climb…

This section was one of my favorites. We crossed over several mountain streams, full with snow-melt and practically waterfalls as they tumbled down the mountains, and got a good view of that crazy pale blue-green water when we crossed the Whirlpool River. (This was caused by all the “glacial till” — silt in the water that scattered the light the same way dust in the atmosphere scatters light, and with the same effect. The rivers and lakes were all unreal aqua blues and greens, even though a bucket of river water was essentially colorless, albeit silty.) Eventually we came to Athabasca Falls, where the Athabasca River puts on an awe-inspiring display of power.

Some photos from the day’s ride:

Athabasca Falls is where our route rejoined the Icefields Parkway, and our lodgings (the Athabasca Falls Hostel) was just a few hundred meters past that. We were checked in by Maggie, the lovely (and unflappable, we’d find out the next day) young Scottish woman who managed the hostel, got shown our bunks, and then we got to work on dinner. Soon enough we were fed, warm and dry, and hanging out in the hostel’s common room, which kind of reminded me of “Hodgepodge Lodge.”

We were expecting more rain in the morning.

This is the second 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.

We got up, not early not late, and had breakfast with our hosts Rod and Ivy. We chatted some more, and got to know them better over breakfast: they were from Manitoba originally, moved to Alberta to become farmers/ranchers and raise their kids, then moved to Calgary to run a business with friends for a few years before retiring. Good people, and they had some interesting stories (about themselves and the area), and they also gave us some good advice: Rod has a brother who used to live near Jasper; he used to travel that way often and knew a better, more easterly route than our plan of simply driving backwards up our bike route. It would be less direct but would involve easier highway driving, and we wouldn’t spoil the surprise of our bike route — an important consideration!

We left them with many thanks, did some last-minute shopping, and finally hit the road, with one last stop at this Canadian icon:

Coffee and donuts at Tim Horton’s! We felt very Canadian, but probably blew any cred we had by taking tourist selfies in front of the local gas station…

But we were ready now, and we settled in for our seven hour drive. (We took Rod’s advice.) Most of the way, we were in beautiful but flat farmland, then slowly it became beautiful, rolling farms and forests, and then finally we could see the mountains ahead of us and the scenery started getting dramatic. We also had a moose sighting when it ambled across the road in front of us. (We hear moose sightings are rare, but bear sightings are… not.) The moose escaped the camera eye, but here are some photos taken from the latter part of the drive:

Once we got into town we found the hostel, which was fairly new, and modern, and basically awesome. The first thing we saw were a bunch of elk hanging out in the yard; the guy at the front desk told us they’d called the park to shoo them away, but we didn’t mind as long as we all left each other alone (they can be dangerous, especially ewes with young, like this group). We gave them a wide berth until they moved on, but I did get some pictures:

We got ourselves settled in to our rooms, finished building our bikes, ran a bunch of errands — we had to buy fuel for our camp stoves, bear repellent spray (yikes!) and a few other things we couldn’t take on an airplane, among other things — then grabbed burgers and beers outside at a brewpub, while the sky remained light until well after 10:00.

We’ve arrived!