On to Canada

One of the things that I have always wanted to do was to see Banff Park. So after going through Glacier, we went into Canada. (I will apologize now, as this is long.)

We made a stop in Cardston to go to the temple but it was closed for it's annual cleaning. So we decided to use the time to take in the Remington Alberta Carriage Center. There are all kinds of carriages and wagons. They also have a place where they restore/rebuild wagon/carriages for people. Some that they have rebuilt came to them in the trunk of a car, consisting of only the metal parts of the original carriage.

There were a few things that I learned about wheels in this area.
1) Iron rims expand, and thus come off, from hitting against hard surfaces such as rocks or cobble streets.
2) The spokes in a wheel are slightly pointed on one side so that they get assembled correctly. Spokes are put in at a slight slant.
3) The wheel is concave from the rim to the axle. It goes on the wagon with the concave surface facing out. This keeps the wheel from coming apart when going around corners and the pressure is shifted.

One of the freight carts that I found interesting is called a Red River cart. It was made completely of wood. Even the axle was all wood. The spokes, cross bars, etc. were kept in with wood wedges driven in to the ends.

The story goes that a freighter left with two regular wagons and several of these two wheeled Red River carts. He lost one of the wagons when it fell apart and the other when it sank. He reached his destination with all of the Red River carts. They float but the bottom things need to be protected as they will get wet.

We made a swing through Calgary, with the hopes of seeing one of my cousins, but she was not feeling well.

We passed through Canadian prairie as we went north to Calgary. This picture is of the prairie ending where it approaches the mountains.

The rain that we had in Glacier continued, but we went on to Banff. We parked the trailer at a campground just out of Banff (town) and then went driving with the truck.

This is around the town of Banff.
These are as we traveled in the park. You can see that sometimes the clouds cooperated and sometimes not.
I took this next one for C. It is a good picture that shows a vanishing point.
We stopped in at Lake Louise. The next pictures are in that area.

The white at the upper end of the lake is dropped from glaciers. There are glaciers further up.


You can see that the mountains are steep and go right up from about nothing.

Not far from Lake Louise is Lake Moraine. (Google Moraine to find out what this means.) These next two were on the way to Lake Moraine. One shows the formation well because of the snow. (I forgot to tell that there was fresh snow on the peaks when the clouds starting raising.) If you click on the other one, you can see where the rock wall lost a huge area looking almost like a cave entrance.

Lake Moraine gets it's name from the glacier pile of debris that has formed a dam. They think the slide occurred further up the canyon and rode down on the glacier, being deposited when the glacier melted.
You can see the many glaciers on top in this next picture looking towards the end of the lake. It is a much smaller lake than Louise. There is also a snow chute.
This is the glacier at it's upper end.
I took this as we left. Note the smoke. It would have felt good as it was cold.
There is a tram, that is not far from the town of Banff, that runs up to the top of Sulfur Mountain. The lookout at the top was originally used to study solar rays. (At that time you hiked to the top. You still can if you want.) The next morning we decided to take it to the top. It had stopped raining but there were lots of low clouds on the mountains when we started out.

This was looking out the tram as we went up, before we reached the cloud level.
Once we reached the top, I tried to take pictures showing a 360 degrees view.
You can see the town in the next one.
When we got to the top, we could see the original lookout station. So we hiked on up to it.
This is looking back to the tram, the restaurant and gift shop that are at the top.
These were taken from the lookout
and as we came down.
These were taken as we traveled west and out of the park.
I took this picture because it shows both geological actions that formed the mountains in the area. The one on the left shows horizontal rock layers from lifting and the one on the right more vertical rocks from uplift tipping.
This is a game overpass. There were several in this area. There are also drift fences on each side to guide the game to them.
We didn't go on to Jasper. It has a lot more glaciers but we figured we wouldn't be able to see much of them because of the weather. We both thought that the mountains in Canada were more impressive then the mountains in Glacier. They are really rugged and steep.

Glacier Park

It was a beautiful, clear and warm day as we drove north to the east side of Glacier Park. We parked the trailer at St. Mary, had dinner out side while looking at the beautiful scenery, and looked forward to seeing the park the next day.
We planned to drive west in the morning over the 'Going to the Sun' highway and then come back on it in the afternoon. That way we could have good light for picture taking while going both ways.

The next morning we awoke to cooler temperatures and some clouds moving quickly over head. The aspen trees in this area are dwarfed, probably from the winters and wind. (The joke is that locals will say that the wind is "just blowing today." when asked if the wind always blows like this.
This tree isn't much more than twelve feet tall, like the others in the area.

The wind kept blowing and it wasn't long until the sky looked like this.
However, we took off hoping for the best and that we could still see some of the mountains.

There were some showers that started to go through areas. The lack of sunshine didn't give me the best pictures but we were able to see some of the mountains.

These are of upper St. Mary lake.
This is of the first glacier that we could see.
We were getting higher. This was looking back in the direction we had come.
By the time we got to the visitor center on Logan Pass it was dumping down rain. We made a run for it to the center. There were several others taking a break also so the center was packed. We waited for the rain to ease up, and then continued on our way.

Since we were now up in the clouds one couldn't see very far to take pictures. As we started down the other side the rain stopped for awhile and we had some clouds lift.

This is looking down into the bowl that was left after a glacier had melted. Just beyond the rim it drops many feet into a canyon. You can vaguely see the road going down on the distant right hillside.

I wanted to get a picture of all the different kinds of flowers growing side by side, but never did get one taken. I did get these flowers and the water falls from the cab window (it was raining outside) while we were waiting in line at one of the road construction sites.

Since we weren't going to get any sun shinning on the hills in the afternoon, we decided to take the road around the southern edge of the park on our way back to St. Mary.

We stopped in at the top of Marias Pass, just 5280 feet high. This is the continental divide. If Lewis and Clark had come this way, they wouldn't have had such a high pass when they crossed the divide. I think they ran into some Black Feet Indians, got into a skirmish, killed two of them, and then quickly left before more came when they went to explore this way.

There is a sign here at the pass which explains some of the geology of the area. I found it quite interesting. The mountain that it refers to is pictured below.
This rock, also at the stop, shows some of the layers that are seen in the hillsides.
I love the colors of all the rocks that wash down from the mountains in Montana. As a kid growing up I didn't realize that rocks in other parts of America weren't as colorful. These are crushed gravel. They can be this small, be boulders, or any size in between.
As we went back, we also stopped in at East Glacier. The lodge there was built by the NP railroad. It's structure is interesting. The posts on the front of the building were trees.
The posts on the inside were specially harvested to preserve the bark and not mare it. You can see that it is still looking good. You can also see the size of the trees. One was cut in half and used as a table/counter. It was over 200 years old.
I felt like a small child next to this guy.
There was some service berry bushes where we had parked the truck. We had some on the ranch where I grew up but we didn't know what they were for several years. They taste somewhat like a mild apple and are good in pies, jelly, etc. These were jucier than the ones we had.
By the time we got back to St. Mary, this was the weather.
Oh well.

Something I learned while at the park: There is a point in the park along the continental divide that the water not only flows two directions, but three. One goes to the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River. One goes to the Atlantic Ocean via the Missouri River. One goes to Hudson Bay.