Someday is now in Jasper National Park!

Oh my goodness, so much to catch up on!

We are quite enjoying this rail travel thing but ooooh doggies, the days are long and the mornings come quickly. Not much time for blogging.

We have trained two full days (like 12 hours plus each) since Whistler and rolled to a stop in Jasper National Park in Alberta last night. It was the end of the first of three segments to our trip. Meaning we said good-bye to our lovely train hostesses Laura and Corrina (who taught us the word “ticketyboo” which we all laughed at until we realized it means the same as the equally sensical “hunky dory”). We wished travel farewells to Aussie aisle-mates Bruce and John, and we got ready to be away from the rails and settle in one spot for a bit. Changing hotels and the associated room numbers each night has brought some confused weariness.

The scenery from the train has been magnificent. We could not have asked for better weather – the skies are clear and the sun is bright. We’ve been told by a few locals that our time in their various spots has been some of the best weather they’ve had all summer. Indeed, we were just the third train in three months that has been able to make the trip we just completed. Due to wildfires that jumped the tracks and lots of resulting smoky skies, all the earlier voyages were disappointingly by bus. We are remembering to count our blessings.

Our first full day on the train two days ago started in Whistler and puttered to a long-anticipated stop in Quesnel. We were delayed about two hours due to some rail traffic and heat.

It was so warm outside (low 90s), the metal train rails ran the risk of expanding and filling in gaps in the tracks designed for this purpose. However, the expansion isn’t always even; sometimes there are little humps and sways in the tracks. So to avoid inconveniences…like derailments…train speeds were restricted. We therefore followed the Mighty Fraser River veeeeeery slowly for quite some time.

We started in the mountain, went through some deep river gorges, and climbed to the high alpine desert. The late afternoon sun lit up lovely farmy plateaus in warm gold light, and we said goodbye to the sun along ranchland. All the while eating gourmet food and sipping lovely Okanagan Valley wine. It was all rather decadent and a far cry from our more typical Wheat Thins and Wendy’s-infused road trips.

Quesnel was exactly as anticipated: a place to spend the night. I was sad, though, that we arrived too late for the town to show us what it had to offer. The people who greeted us at the dark train station and the hotel we super duper friendly and loved their little lumber hamlet with a passion. So many smiles and thank yous and waves. Our bus driver from the train station to our hotel – a route that we truly could have walked – was stretched as far as he could get away with so as to explain why he loved his job and his home and hoped that we would all come back some day and see it in the daylight.

Quesnelians are rather proud of their painted
fire hydrants around town.  I was rather
proud I got this shot in as much focus as I
did given the sleep deprivation.

Yesterday’s route was Quesnel to Jasper, crossing both the province and time zone boundaries in the process. We are now in the Mountain time zone in the lovely province of Alberta. We will be here a few more days for Segment 2 Adventures.

The scenery highlights yesterday were wildlife and Rocky Mountains. Since we left Whistler, we have seen osprey, a big horn ram and his harem, and a mama moose (reportedly with baby but I didn’t see it)…all pretty close to the chugging train. I was also pretty excited to see hundreds of bright pink sockeye salmon spawning in the river.

The salmon are the (conveniently) salmony-colored blobs.

However, the highlight sighting was yesterday when someone yelled “BEAR ON THE LEFT!!”

I happened to be sitting on the left side and saw the most beautifully healthy and stout black bear lumbering through some low grasses less than 50 feet from the train tracks! OMG!!

I’m proud to say I don’t have a photo of the beauty. Instead I chose to savor the moment instead of wasting it getting my camera to focus. But believe me when I say it was a large and happy bear, so much closer than I’ve ever seen outside of a zoo, and pretty dang awesome.

What I did take lots of photos of, though, was mountains. Soaring, immense, hunks of rock scraping the unusually cloudless blue sky. Mountains like in Alaska, where they are so enormous you can’t possibly photograph them nor truly comprehend them. That didn’t keep me from trying, however.

It's impossible to see here how gigantic these mountains are!

I have seen the American Rockies. The Canadian ones seem somehow even more extraordinarily tall even though Canada’s highest peak (Mount Robson at just shy of 13,000 feet) is shorter than several in the US.

We were told this peak of Mount Robson is usually only
visible about 30 days per year.  WOW!

Rob and I discussed this while enjoying some Merlot because, well, we had time.

We concluded the difference in my mountain height perception is a result of the concept of “relief.” Relief in geographical terms is the difference between the highest and the lowest elevations in an area. So while the US has mountains in the Rockies that are taller than 13,000 feet, I have viewed them from a higher elevation than where I’ve been hanging out on the train (currently about 3,000 feet). So these somewhat smaller Canadian mountains look bigger because I am seeing them from a lower elevation. Make sense? If not, might I recommend some Sumac Ridge Merlot to help clear things up?

We arrived in Jasper last night well after dark so we weren’t sure what we would wake up to this morning. Ummm… it is pretty gorgeous here.

The town of Jasper is unique because it is wholly within a national park. However, you wouldn’t really know it; it looks and feels like a mountainy tourist town complete with ice cream shops and tacky souvenir stands, white haired tourists with fanny packs and patchouli-scented 20-somethings with backpacks.

Jasper is surrounded by more of those immense mountains, giving it something of the feel of Jackson Hole, Wyoming but not quite so jaggedy. Elk are common residents so there are actual warning signs as well as tell-tale ones, like when a bunch of cars are pulled off to the side of the road and lots of cameras are pointed in the same direction.

My One Wildlife Photo (well, aside from the salmony blobs)

Our morning today was spent on a short tour to a lake and then a small canyon. I was honestly a little ho-hum about the idea; sleep sounded much more intriguing than an 8:50am dressed-and-ready start time in a new time zone.

But the lake proved spectacularly reflective. Our guide got us there just before a light breeze picked up making this photograph no longer possible just a half hour later.

Pyramid Mountain.  The reddish brown trees are not early Fall.
Sadly they are trees infested with mountain pine beetles.
They have been pretty destructive around here for several
years despite making for rather colorful photos. 

Next we went to a place called Malign Canyon, pronounced “mah-LEEN” even though it was aptly named for the definition of “evil in nature or effect; malevolent.” While today it was one of the most interesting and unique…and narrow…canyons I have ever seen, trying to navigate its smoothed-out rock caves and sudden waterfalls in a canoe would have been crazy-making.

We were given an hour to walk along some trails around the canyon. I couldn’t believe we were given so much time in what looked like a small park. I anticipated I would be browsing the nearby gift store for 45 minutes.

Instead, I wish we had had at least three more hours so we could have taken a much longer walk down to the bottom of the canyon. Although the canyon was narrower than a football field, it was super deep and had the most interesting rock formations.

Learning another new word today, I discovered I was seeing evidence of karst topography. Googling, that officially means “a landscape formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks such as limestone. It is characterized by underground drainage systems with sinkholes and caves.” In other words, soft rocks like limestone get slowly carved away by water and result in really cool caves and waterfalls.

I was so fascinated by the curvy, swirly rock walls, I forgot that I have knee and back problems and trekked down the declining trail with my only worry being the time. We got as far as anyone on our bus did, even if I did overhear some whipper snapper not on our tour refer to me and Rob and another guy as “the old people.” I was tempted to throw my hat at him but then he would have seen my hair and been vindicated.

"Old People" rocking the Malign Canyon Trail

We made it back to the bus in time to get a geological book at the gift store and for me to tend to my injury. Yes, I should have known better than to hike down and up that canyon with such confidence. Dang fence caught my thumb and broke my nail. My back and knee, however, are doing splendidly so far. THANK YOU, SURGEONS!!

We grabbed some lunch in town. After all the fancy meals on the train, we were craving something more “normal.” We asked the shuttle driver for the best pizza place in town and had far too much fun having a Canadian Bacon pizza in Canada. Fun fact: here they call it “back bacon” which sounded really wrong and kinda gross. However, we determined it thicker and sweeter and better than the stuff we attach the nationality to in the U.S.

As either as sign of age or maturity, we decided to forego more touring today and instead decided to enjoy the rest of the afternoon relaxing, reading, blogging, and waiting for the shade to envelope the chairs outside out hotel room. Perhaps we’ll go find a nice glass of Merlot.

We continue Segment 2 tomorrow with a bus and touring southward. Stay tuned!

Lovely lake near our hotel.  What a beautifully relaxing afternoon!