The Drive From Lake Louise

Hinton, Alberta

We left Lake Louise fairly early. We got to see lots of stunning scenery that two years ago was frozen over. There are many lakes and with the sun shining, we think the pictures turned out very nice.

Part of the wavy road.

After a while we started to see signs that said runners on road. Pretty soon we caught up to some of the runners, and then there were a lot. At several places on the way there were large congregations of cars and runners. We found out later that there were 60 teams of 15 runners each running from Banff to Jasper. We thought it was kind of neat.

These were among the first runners we saw.

These places were where the next runners waited for their team-members.

The problem I had with the whole thing was not with the runners, but with the cars and people stopped along the way. More than once as I was pulling hard up a steep grade, one of the cars would pull into traffic right in front of me and then slow me down so much that several times the truck started to overheat. Then they would go slow to take pictures of their runners. One was so bad that Cindy wanted me to honk at them, but I didn’t. Instead I tailgated them so much that they finally got off the road and let me go. Several cars acted like they wanted their doors taken off, opening them in front of oncoming traffic on narrow roads.

 The Athabaska Glacier.

The buses went a long way onto the ice.

Linda pointing at the buses for her Mom.

This looks to over a mile to the Glacier.

Penny started barking and acted afraid of the bear statue.

We stopped at the Ice Fields Center and took lots of pictures of the Glacier. Linda and Cindy’s Mom caught up with as while at the Ice Center. We took more pictures of us with the Mounty Moose and Bear. We also checked out the gift shop, but we didn’t get anything. Cindy’s mom did buy a few things. I think last time we were there, there were a lot more exhibits open, but this time there was a lot of construction going on. One sign showed where the glacier was in 1843 and we could see how much it had receded. It looks like more than a mile.

Coming off the mountain toward Jasper the road was very rough and didn’t get any better until we were almost to Jasper. I told Linda that the further north we got, the worse the roads were and now she sees why I said that.

Linda was following us and told us later that a bear ran across the road in front of her. We didn’t see any animals until we got through Jasper, but Cindy has so many pictures that I’m going to wait to put any more on the post, so stayed tuned.

Thanks for visiting.