I couldn’t think of a better title so I used another of my favorite lines from The Hobbit. Since my last post I’ve made my way through Canada and back into the US while simultaneously making my way into The Lord of the Rings audiobooks as well, so it will most likely be several months before I’m able to retrain my brain so that not everything is a Middle Earth reference.

Title ideas (or a lack thereof) aside, here are a few more pictures from my trip so far, although I have to say that the Jasper/Banff area is so beautiful that I actually got overloaded and gave up trying to take good pictures of everything out there.

I also hiked quite a bit around Moraine Lake and thought it was absolutely beautiful, but frankly I couldn’t get a picture I was happy with on my phone. It ‘s a gorgeous place and if I ever had to choose a toddler/elderly-friendly hiking destination for a vacation that’d definitely be one of the top contenders, but the pieces needed to get a good shot of the glacier from across the lake with the mountains also framed in correctly felt beyond my current capabilities. I’ll keep my pictures, but they frankly feel outclassed by some of the aerial photos I’ve seen and I think it’d at least take a fairly nice camera to do the whole place justice.

Scenic overload aside, the whole Jasper/Banff set of parks really is incredible and feels completely safe while still retaining at least a modest sense of wilderness. It absolutely deserves its reputation as a travel destination and I’m glad I passed through. Having mentioned the sense of security that comes with the place however, I did have my first Canadian bear encounter at Moraine Lake and it was pretty alarming. I had to unload my whole mace canister before the burly beast turned tail. Luckily I made it out unscathed, but thank heavens for bear spray.

I’d actually planned the Canadian portion of this run thinking that I’d save the best for last when it came to photos, and intentionally ended this leg of the trip with a run up Ha Ling Peak outside of Banff. The mountain is a pretty popular spot for pictures that give a sort of “top of the world” feel, so I thought it’d be a great hike to end off on.

I started that day camping at Spray Lakes about 30 minutes away, and as I put my tent away it started raining. “No big deal,” I thought to myself, “it seems like the rain’s about to let up here in a bit anyways.” I was right, and as I drove to the trailhead at Ha Ling the rain slowly subsided, apparently so that it could abruptly be reborn as a barrage of sleet and hail. “No big deal,” I thought a second time, “I didn’t want to get rained on anyways. Rain would make me wet, this stuff mostly just bounces off…” About 15 minutes after that, the hail turned into this:

“Even better,” I thought a last time, “I didn’t want to get beat on by hail anyways, and snow is comfy and quiet.”

As a middle-school gym teacher once told me, I’m probably better off not thinking, since these thoughts apparently offended the local mountain spirits and moved them to produce bitter and cold winds to nip and whip at my face and ears and nips. Weather, nips, and fell nature deities aside, I finished the hike largely undeterred and made my way to the internationally famous vantage point, where I’d initially hoped to get a photo of something like this:

And ended up with this view from literally about 20 meters away from where the shot above was taken.

I learned later that it is unusual for people to even be able to go sledding in this area even in October, so it seems that I was graced with the first sticking snow in the area for 2021. I feel special, but also eternally salty.

All in all, my Alcan leg of my trip was great and I’m happy to say that it was huge a success in my eyes, even with an almost funny but mostly annoying subversion of my expectations on the last day.

I’ll be taking a couple of days here to better flesh out the American leg of my trip and then it’s on to the Lone Star state!