Cassiar Highway

After leaving the splendor of the Icefield Parkway we stopped for the night in a the little town of Hoston. We had the best breakfast of the trip at a local dinner. What is it about small town dinners? They always have the best breakfasts. My pancakes were fantastic...the best I've had in years, maybe ever! Anyway, while there we we chatting with a nice local ranching couple. They told us that they'd never traveled the Cassiar themselves but had heard from some truckers who regularly dive it that the northern stretch is even prettier than the Icefield Parkway. We had a hard time believing that but more fantastic scenery sounded good to us. So off we went to find out for ourselves which stretch of road was best...






We stopped just after getting on the Cassiar in Kitwancool. This small native village had a small museum and excellent collection old totems, many recently restored.


Our Milepost (an Alaska and Canada highway guidebook) mentioned to watch for bears on the side of the road. Ok, I thought, maybe I'll get to see a bear. Well less than 10 miles on the highway and we pass a mother black bear with a new cub. She quickly hustled the cub back into the brush and out of sight before I could pull the camera out. Oh well, I thought, no bear pictures for us but seeing them was nice. Then just a few miles later we came across another black bear, this time a lone adult. Just a few miles after that we came around a bend to see a mother with three cubs! So we'd been on the Cassiar for less that an hour seen 6 black bears and saw only a couple of cars heading the other way. Our kind of highway, more bears than cars! I decided to keep track of how many bears and other wildlife we saw on this stretch of the road (Kris made fun of my geek tendencies and need to count wildlife but I ignored him).

We saw lots more black bears (16 of them, 9 adults and 7 cubs), a family of grizzlies (a mother and 2 year-old cubs), caribou (7; 2 groups of 3 and 1 lone one), a moose, three grouse, some gray jays, several snowshoe hare, a porcupine, and more red squirrels than we could count. Not bad for one day's drive (or 450 miles).

Black bear...





























Grizzlies....
Mom









Baby (well teenager in bear life span anyway)












Caribou































Moose




This road was beautiful in its own right. Lots of mountains, glaciers, and waterfalls. They were a bit further away from the road though so not the up close, in your face views of the Icefield Parkway. The Cassair had lots of streams, small and a few large lakes, plenty of marshes, and lots more trees. The real spleander of this section, at least in our opinion, was the abundant wildlife. So the Icefield Parkway won for most scenic mountain views and the Cassair for it's wildlife.

Baxter's Cure

This is Baxter's cure for carsickness. He would fuss and get a little motion-sick every morning. We'd try to go an hour or two down the road, then take him out into the woods someplace and get him tired, as well as getting him back off his "sea legs."

Then the rest of the day he would use this method to deal with traveling. It was a good arrangement for all involved.

Plan B

Well, after finding the Going To The Sun Road closed in Glacier NP, we were kinda stuck on the wrong side of the park. This left us with "Plan B," which was to travel into Canada still on the west side of the Continental Divide, and continue up the Icefield Parkway through Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada.

At this, we made a discovery. The Icefield Parkway in Banff is the most beautiful road in the world.

For the first whole day, we barely took any pictures at all. It seemed pointless, since everything was equally spectacular. Big, rocky mountains and hanging glaciers everywhere, most of them looming right over the road, at most a few miles away. And this continues on both sides of the road more-or-less through the entire park. We spent two days traveling through here and we could easily have spent two weeks. There were endless peaks, rivers and valleys; anything we would have been happy to be out exploring, if we weren't, you know, Going Somewhere.

This was shot at a REST STOP, for crying out loud. As if the planners noticed "Well, a bit of a bad stretch here, scenery-wise. Might as well put the toilet here." This whole road is amazing. We shot this rather tippy photo of ourselves by propping the camera on the truck's not-too-level hood. Note the crappy rest-stop scenery in the background.












There is a very nice bit of scenery here called The Weeping Wall. As far as I know, it's not connected to any religious strife and so is a bit more uplifting than the Wailing variety in Israel. It's a huge mountain which is ringed by a wide plateau, which seems to gather all the snowmelt from the main pinnacle. This all sinks through the rocks and exits the lower wall as little spouting waterfalls from various cracks all over the rock face.

As we were traveling along, we passed a sign warning of Sheep on the road. The sign was the standard yellow diamond, but had flashing amber lights on both sides. "They must really be serious that we might see some sheep up here," we thought. We hadn't seen any yet, so Chris fished out the camera just in case. Literally around the first corner, we come to this fine sight: a huge collection of sheep (all rams, we think) standing in a highway pull-off across the road from the steep cliff wall. Can't imagine why they would choose to hang out there, but it certainly makes them much easier to photograph than trying to find them up on the cliffside. Maybe the amber lights on the sign are triggered by this gentleman's fine neckwear...

Glacier National Park

May 26,

We headed into Glacier intending to take the Going to the Sun Road from west to east and then head up to the Canadian Border on the east side of the Rockies. Unfortunately the road had been damaged by the spring melt from what we were told was an unusually high snow fall winter. We could only make it about 16 miles into Glacier before the road closed, so no going up and over the pass for us.

There was still quite a bit of snow on the mountains and melting runoff creating waterfalls everywhere we looked.




We did get to see some nice views of the mountains from Lake McDonald and take a short walk down to this waterfall.








So then it was on to plan B for us…We'd stay on the west side of the continental divide and head into Canada, visiting Banff National Park in Canada.

We had some great views of the Glacier Mountains as we drove up the valley to the border.

















We were all set to be searched by Canadian customs, had our passports out, and had all of kitty's vet papers and international bill of health all ready. The customs agent looked at our passports, asked where we were going, and why. Once he heard Kris was a doctor all he asked was where he went to school and then waved us on our way. No trouble about having the cat -- he didn't even care to see the paperwork -- no searching the car. So we were on our way with no fuss at all...much easier than we expected. Either the words "I'm a doctor" helped or the fact that we had all the paperwork meant that, of course, we wouldn't need it. Now it was off across BC to Banff....

May 25, 2009

After Yellowstone we headed to Bozeman, MT for the night. We spend the next morning doing errands (laundry, restocking food for Baxter and snacks for us) and taking advantage of the hotel’s wireless to finally get some more postings up. It was afternoon before we headed back out on the road so mostly we just spent the day driving. We decided to head to the western side of Glacier, our next destination on the western parks tour.

We camped at the Hungry Horse Reservoir, on National Forest Land just outside the park. Here are a few pics of the reservoir and our campsite.

Pics are taking too long to upload from the computer and we want to go have so dinner so I'll add them later.

Here they are...

Yelowstone

Our next National Park was Yellowstone. We got there in the early afternoon, having come over the pass and down out of the Beartooths that morning. We, of course, did the obligatory Entrance Sign photos. Mine, in Beth Grimaldi's honor, pointing out the Bison Butt helpfully included on the entrance gate.

There was still plenty of snow in the high places in Yellowstone, several feet deep in the 8,000-foot elevations. We got a mix of sun and clouds all day long.

Yellowstone is a great park for critters, and they didn't disappoint. Never did find a grizzly, but we came across a black bear. Elk and bison (butts and otherwise) were everywhere. On the way out, in the valley just north of the park entrance in Montana, we saw a small group of Dall sheep up on the cliff face, basically straight over our heads. Chris got a nice photo of a mommy and baby sheep, with the baby getting herded back behind the rocks and away from the silly photographers. I'll put all the critters at the end of this post.

Once we got down to the lower elevations in the northern part of the park, we got into the geothermal stuff. Very stinky and steamy, but lots of pretty colors to see. Chris and I especially liked Firehole creek, where the not-very-sulfurous steaming-hot water pours straight from the boiling cauldron into one of the best trout streams in the park. Not really sure how this helps the fishing, but the highest density of trout fishermen was certainly on the Firehole.

Here's one of Mammoth Hot Springs, which was much stinkier than the Firehole, but likewise had great colors and lots of boiling water.

From here it was off to try to get into Glacier National Park.

We'll get the critter pictures posted soon...

Baxter's Commentary

Forgot this fine photo from our day in South Dakota.

Just Baxter leaving his commentary when we told him it was time to head back into the car and stop climbing on the rocks. I think he'd prefer to stay in the Black Hills with the critters...