Canadian Rockies by
Motorcoach and Rail
June 3 - 10, 2017
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Moraine
Lake with Ice and the Ten Peaks Range
Banff National Park
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Introduction. It doesn't seem that long ago that Patty and I were lab assistants in Mr. Wood's chemistry class at OD Wyatt High School yet, on June 3, 2017, we celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. Time really does fly and, in this sense, wonderfully so. To celebrate, we took a motorcoach and rail tour of the Canadian Rockies in the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. By motorcoach, we toured Banff, Jasper, and Yoho National Parks with stays in the towns of Banff and Jasper, Alberta. Day 1 of the rail portion, aboard the Rocky Mountaineer, took us from Jasper to Kamloops, British Columbia, where we overnighted. Day 2 took us from Kamloops to Vancouver I had been to the Banff and Jasper areas with my family the summer before Patty and I started dating (that would be 1971) and I've been telling her for decades that we should go up there and let her experience what I loved during that first visit. Patty and both felt that this was a wonderful trip. The Canadian Rockies are gorgeous. We saw a lot of wildlife, both while touring by motocoach and while on the train, including bears (munching on dandelions on the side of the road), rocky mountain goats, big horn sheep, golden-mantled ground squirrels, chipmunks, elk, mule deer, bald eagles, and osprey. We saw beautiful lakes, some with ice still on them and others colored brilliant shades of turquoise from glacial flour suspended in them. We saw glaciers like you don't see in the USA and, at the Columbia Icefield, we took a trip, via massive Ice Explorer, onto the Athabasca Glacier were we enjoyed the cool air and marveled at the massiveness of glaciers. We saw rivers gorged with water and wildly rushing, many to exciting waterfalls, fed by melting snow and glacial ice. And then, there was the engineering marvel of the spiral tunnels where the grade up and down the mountains are made more manageable for train use and where the long trains cross over themselves as they negotiate the spiral tunnel system (we'll visit that and go through in a future trip). The food along the way was excellent, especially onboard the Rocky Mountaineer. We even discovered a good place to eat in Jasper: Evil Dave's Grill on Patricia Street. We learned a new term, "brilliant", to replace "awesome." And, as you'll see from many of the photos, the weather was perfect.
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