This is an unusual travel day. We won't have any hookups for the next three days, so we're staying in our electric-only camp site until check-out time at 11:00 a.m. We are heading to a boondocking site just 1.5 hours away, and we don't want to arrive until around 4:00. So we have scoped out some large parking areas on the road to park the motor home and relax for the afternoon. We picked this sight in the shadow of Mount Kerkeslin.
Welcome to our view for the next several hours. This is the "Glacier and Goat" view point along the Icefield Parkway. Even though we searched more than once, we didn't see either one. But the temperature is lovely to spend some time inside or outside.
Speaking of temperature, this is the weather forecast for the next several days. A bit nippy this week for August, wouldn't you say? With high temperatures in the 40's and 50's and lows close to freezing, it will be an interesting time to not have electricity.
Our move today is carefully orchestrated around the availability of electricity. We hope we will be able to use our generator to keep our batteries charged and our refrigerator going while we are boondocking. But with our ailing electrical transfer switch, we don't know if we'll be able to use our generator or not. So we have frozen extra ice and reorganized our food just in case we will be living out of an ice chest. While we are in our scenic parking space this afternoon, Mark rewired the transfer switch for (hopefully) generator power. When it was time to leave, the rains escorted us down the parkway.
The skies cleared as we got to our destination, and the sun was shining on the glaciers to welcome us to our new home base for the next three days.
The Glacier Centre is a national park facility that is very popular with travelers going from Lake Louise Village to Jasper. The RV parking lot stays very full during the day, but by waiting until late afternoon we were able to find a good spot. We pulled into one of the parking spots on the edge, for a great view of the glaciers that now surround us.
The national park charges $15.70 Canadian to park overnight in the parking lot with no services. But the location is awesome for hiking. It's also a great option for travelers who couldn't find any reservations for this weekend. We found out that this is a Canadian civil holiday, so even 6 months ago all the campgrounds were reserved. So this first-come-first-serve boondocking spot was just right for us.
The Glacier Centre stays very busy during the day. There are bathrooms at the Centre, and fast free wifi. When all the crazy crowds leave for the day, the lobby area is still open. Even though we had no cell phone service in this remote location, we found we could make phone calls using wifi calling from the lobby area. That was an unexpected benefit!
Speaking of the crowds, most of the clientele that we see booking the tours at the Glacier Centre are not from North America. We are seeing large groups of Asians buying those expensive tickets. The differences in those cultures leads to some interesting signs in the bathroom.
Just across the road is the most visited glacier in the world. Like many people that visit here, we can walk to the toe of the Athabasca Glacier. It's receding at the rate of 5 meters per year, so it's a longer walk than it used to be. Signs indicate where the end of the glacier was during different years. Denisa pointed out that if Mark would have brought her here when we were first married, we would have already arrived at the glacier in the picture below.
But it was another steady climb uphill until we could finally stand in front of the Athabasca Glacier today. A rope limits us from actually touching the glacier here.
But we can't help but notice a long line of people skirting those ropes and heading toward the side of the glacier. So we did the same, arriving at a temporary wooden bridge over the river formed from the water melting off the glacier.
Walking the bridge put us on the Athabasca Glacier--our first time to stand on such old ice.
Glaciers form where more snow falls in the winter than melts in the summer. As the weight of the additional snow compresses the new fluffy snow, it becomes ice and eventually a glacier. According to the signs at the base, we are standing on some snow that fell around 400 years ago.
There are some dangers to glacier-walking, as the crevasses that are melting can give way and cause people to fall. So we are careful to keep the crevasse between us.
Instead of the sparkling white and blue ice we envisioned, this 400-year-old ice has picked up lots of dirt and rocks at it has moved down the mountain. So it is a brown glacier here at the toe.
Many visitors pay over $100 for the national park tour that takes them further up to the middle of the glacier. But this is the budget version of the standing-on-a-glacier-tour brought to you by wandering His wonders--who like to enjoy God's wonders for free.
That $100+ tour includes a ride on an ice field explorer bus with big tires that travel on a road carved about half-way up the glacier. We took a picture of one of those monster buses filled with around 40 people as it made its way slowly up the icy road.
But that big bus looks pretty tiny when you see how big the glacier is. That monster bus is just a tiny green dot that is impossible to see when you get the big picture of the Athabasca Glacier.
In case you would expect an intimate time with the glacier for that much money, we zoomed in to see that six buses and hundreds of people were vying for position to see the glacier even on the tour.
The other part of their ticket allows them to walk on the Columbia Icefield Skywalk. This horse-shoe-shaped walkway hangs over the valley and allows visitors to look down through its glass floor. We prefer the views from the mountain tops ourselves.
It is cold out this evening as we're walking back to our parking lot camp site. We're reading the educational signs that explains how this huge moving glacier has picked up large rocks as it moved across this moraine that once housed the rest of this big chunk of ice. The rock bed left behind shows the scratches made from the rocks caught in the ice. The picture was taken to show those rock scratches, but it also nicely shows off Mark's new boots. You might remember him ripping out the toe of his hiking boots a week ago. He was lucky to find a new pair of hiking boots at a sporting goods shop in Lake Louise Village, so he didn't have to duck tape the old ones any more.
We are glad to report that Mark's temporary re-wiring on the electric transfer switch worked again, and we have generator power inside the motor home. If we run the generator for an hour in the morning, and another hour in the evening, we should be able to keep the batteries and the refrigerator happy in this beautiful place we're calling home for the next three days. As the sun begins to set, we share a view of our across-the-street neighbors. We're living in a very impressive neighborhood these days as we wander more of God's wonders!
Even though we are officially heading south now, the hours of day light are still very long. We took this sunset picture around 11:00 p.m. when the sky was still light enough to see the mountains around us.
This is one of North America's best dark-sky viewing areas because it is truly out in the middle of no where. We're almost 100 miles from the little town of Jasper to the north and Lake Louise Village to the south. Bands of high mountains surround us east and west. So there is no ambient light, which means that the skies are so dark you can see stars and galaxies not usually visible. We had to set our alarm for 2:00 a.m. to witness the dark skies for ourselves. So even though we are heading south, we feel like we are still very far north this night.
No comments:
Post a Comment