(written on the 25th from notes taken previously)
After I woke up, I again just wanted to spend some time alone.
The mountains were still socked in with clouds and mist and what not, but I was able to take a few pictures of beautiful scenery that was below the cloud level.
I went over to the information sign at the trailhead to just sort of sit and be by myself for a bit. That’s when I found out that we shouldn’t have parked there overnight. There was a Note on the trailhead board that only Backcountry backpackers who were permitted were allowed to park overnight in that area.
Oops. 😅
We tried to do the right thing, but apparently, failed miserably.
Gratefully, no one came by To let us know during the night, so we at least got to rest all night, as opposed to what happened at The Love’s truck stop in the outskirts of Tacoma.
After a little while, We got ourselves ready for the morning and headed back up the road a little bit to see what we had thought the other night was probably a glacier.
It indeed turned out to be a glacier, the Athabasca glacier.
Cool.
So we went over and parked and hiked up to the glacier. You’re not allowed to hike all the way to the ice itself, Pat we hiked as far as we were allowed. Along the hike, there were signs showing where the glacier was at a given decade, having receded an absolutely massive amount. The first signpost was from I think 1890, and it had been receding steadily since then. I don’t know for sure, but it appears that it’s receded at potentially a significantly quicker rate the last 30 or 40 years.
The glacier makes its own weather, so the wind was howling pretty good, and cold, but we had prepared relatively decently for it.
My mom did a little rockhounding on the way down, trying to find a rock of a particular design for a friend of hers.
We headed south after that, just driving and taking more pictures of beautiful scenery.
I was super bummed with the weather that I didn’t get to see what, for me, was sort of the most important part of coming to the Canadian Rockies–the amazing-looking craggy peaks.
We had State in Wells Gray so long that we missed the good weather for the rest of the range.
And there I was again, focusing on all the negative instead of the beauty that was still available for me to see.
Certainly I could see it, and certainly I could enjoy it, And I did to some degree, but I couldn’t fully enjoy it because I was just so focused on the negative.
Still, we stopped to take pictures over and over and over and over again at gorgeous vistas.
At one point during the drive, I caught something cool looking out of the corner of my eye, put the brakes on, pulled over, and then backed up on the shoulder. I didn’t want to tell my mom what it was, just because I thought it would be cool for her to find it on her own.
So I helped her down the super steep bank that the road had been built on top of, and down to the pretty much perfectly level valley floor below.
And then we walked along a little ways until we saw this.
Clearly not man-made, but still super cool. 🙂
From there, we kept going, taking more and more pictures, stopping to eat lunch at waterfowl Lake, taking more and more pictures of beautiful scenery before stopping at Lake Louise.
We had been hoping to go to Lake Moraine, But apparently, they closed access to it yesterday, So we just barely missed it.
Lake Louise was beautiful, but it was hard to admire the beauty in the midst of the mass of commercialization. The absolutely enormous hotel that goes all the way down to the water. It’s been there for over 100 years, so it’s not like it’s anything new, but it has gotten bigger and bigger, and it just feels… wrong to put man-made stuff next to the breathtaking views of nature.
I know that the human race can make absolutely breathtaking things as well, and truthfully, the hotel was gorgeous in and of itself. It’s just… Place is so beautiful, in my mind, in my soul, should be left as Nature made them, unencumbered by the devices of man.
Not to mention the canoe company that was charging something like $185 an hour to rent a canoe to paddle out on to the lake.
$185 Canadian, but still, that’s like $140 an hour American.
For a canoe?
So you’ve got all these people paddling out into the middle of this brilliantly turquoise Lake at the base of spectacular Canadian Rocky mountains.
It just… Makes it so much harder to enjoy, for me. Even in the off season, It was very crowded.
Gratefully, we were able to find parking. There was plenty of it. And gratefully, there was a trail that you could hike on to go to a lookout point with many fewer people. It was still a little crowded over there, far too crowded for my taste, but far less crowded than down by the lake itself.
So we hiked up to that viewpoint, took pictures, trying to capture the actual color of the incredibly beautiful lake.
That’s been one of the frustrating and discouraging things: I bought this phone because it had a fantastic camera, but I’ve realized just how significant the limitations are. Getting the colors right is most of the time completely impossible, so you play with colors and play with colors and play with colors and tell you at least get the color correct on at least one of the things that’s important to you in the picture, but in getting that thing to the correct color, it nearly universally means that other parts of the picture won’t be the proper color.
I may just end up getting another camera, a real camera, instead of relying on my phone. It’s just… So much easier to rely on my phone. But my phone… Just can’t take really good pictures that accurately represent what I’m looking at.
Still, I’m grateful that I have the camera on the phone and that I can at least get a photo record of where I’ve been and what I’ve seen, especially having my mom along the way with me. It’s really good to be able to spend this time with her in her later years.
Sorry Mom, don’t mean to draw too much attention to your age, but you are getting up there. 😅
Much of the Lake Louise infrastructure was closed or in the process of closing for the season, so we had to hike a little ways to get to bathrooms that were still open, but gratefully, there were some still open.
After we left, we decided that instead of heading south down the mountain chain, we would go back North a little bit, and then go over one of the passes into the next next valley over.
It was completely dark by then, but it didn’t really matter either way because the mountains were so socked in with clouds that you couldn’t see much anyway.
There was a place on the map named Stephen, and I thought it would be a great little photo op To stand next to a sign with my name on it, but I didn’t see a sign anywhere, and we ended up driving by the area without any recognition of the name that was on Google maps.
Didn’t bother trying to find the place from there, and we just headed west over the pass–destination Wapta Falls recreation site, hoping that one of the two campsites at the site would be available.
The rec site was a little bit off the main highway, on a dirt road, over a bridge, and on for a good ways down the dirt road before finally turning off into the trees on a little side dirt road.
Gratefully, we found the place relatively easily (After I frustratingly missed the turn, that is, And had to backtrack); and gratefully, only one of the two camp spots was taken, so we were good to spend the night.
You could hear the rush of the waterfall in the distance, but it was quite dark outside, so there was nothing that we would be able to see from where we were.
Anyway, another day in the books. Things have continued to be pretty tough for me, physically, and emotionally, but… still moving forward.
And I’m grateful for my mom’s support. There’s not much that she can do to actually help, but I know she at least cares.
I wish there was something that could realistically be done, but it’s all internal work that needs to be done.
Hard day. Beautiful scenery. Echoes of New Zealand with the glacier and that bright turquoise Blue water.
😊
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 