Catching Up

We left Prince George on Friday morning, generally following the Fraser River upstream towards its headwaters near Yellowhead Pass, which is on the Continental Divide.  The broad river valley got narrower and the mountains got higher as we climbed toward the pass.  At one rest area we had a great view of Mt Robson, which is Canada’s highest peak.

This was just prior to the pass, and afterwards it was only a short way to the town of Jasper, home of Jasper National Park.  We haven’t made many reservations all summer, and this time it caught up with us.  All of the campgrounds near Jasper were already full so we had to go further east, outside of the park for a site at a nearby KOA which was very nice, even if a little expensive.

Saturday morning we backtracked to Jasper to catch the Icefields Parkway tollroad through Jasper and Banff National Parks.  We were here in 1998 on a motorcycle trip from south to north.  It was fun to test our memories of that trip and to see the same geography from the opposite direction.  Bob thinks this highway, from Jasper nearly to Calgary, is the MOST scenic drive in North America.  Even though is not twisty, nor steep, nor narrow.  It is lined with sharp mountains, glaciers, waterfalls, and rivers for almost 250 miles.  Here are a couple of snapshots, although our point-and-shoot camera cannot begin to do it justice.

If this drive is not already on our readers’ “bucket list” it should be, and at the top.

We are spending Saturday night, without hookups, at a small provincial park near Banff.  On Sunday we will backtrack just a little to head west into British Columbia once again.  Then we head south to cross the border back into USA, where our cell phones should return to normal.  Although they will work here, they are turned off to avoid $2/minute International Roaming charges.  We will be stopping in Montana to visit with fellow Nomads from last winter’s Arizona project.