Hoary Marmots

Short Version:
Goats and elk, a crack in the ground, oldies galore, we ride up a hill. Hoary marmots. Cold. We ride down a hill, singing. Eggy burritos

Long Version:
On the third day, we paid for a National Park Pass. The gravel-eating goats were at the same spot along the highway, bt three of them had foregone gravel-ingestion in favor of performing gravity-defying acts of grace and agility high on the face of the cliff. Lovely Wife spied a big bull elk in the woods, and then we had to stop to allow a cow elk to cross the road. Nasty old man coming the other way didn't stop and just about ran into her. I shook my fist at him, which made the elk feel much more loved.

We jumped off the highway just short of Jasper town, and went to see what we could see at Maligne* Canyon. What we could see, initially, was a busload of seniors. They were pretty determined to get their money's worth of view from the bridge over the canyon, and weren't shy about pushing even the scruffiest, smelliest, scraggly-beardiest (comparatively) youngster out of their way to get it. Once
they started to pass over (the bridge, that is) and we got a chance to peer over the edge, we could see why: it was pretty impressive. Sheer walls dropped away 15m to the river's surface. The water was churning and boiling its way through the constricting rock walls, which had had some pretty striking curves carved out of them by the current over the course of however many centuries the canyon's been in existence. Ravens were nesting on what looked like vertical faces, and young birds - already huge - were flapping about the place, landing unsteadily on narrow ledges and cawing noisily above the roar of the river. The oldies turned left off the bridge, towards the restaurant. We went right, downstream, to waterfalls and more bridges, and viewpoints which showed us how jagged a crack the canyon must have been before the water started to round off its sharpnesses.

And then it was time to ride. Up, as usual, this time on an old fire road, long since blocked to vehicular traffic. Plants had encroached on the clearway, but the grade was gentle and the surface smooth enough. As we got higher, the track got steeper, but nothing untoward and despite stopping a couple of times to chat with hikers coming the other way**, we were making good time. Not good enough to challenge the record, we later found out - in fact our leisurely 100-minute climb was more than half an hour longer than the fastest known ride-time. Still, we were in good shape at the intersection where the fire road meets the campground spur and the hiking-only Skyline Trail (from whence the hikers had come), and decided to go see what we could see up at the old fire lookout. We weren't expecting much in the way of views, given that the trail had started out misty at the base of the mountain, and grown progressively more clouded as we ascended***. The fire road took us to a peak which looked out over the town, and which - on a clear day - would have afforded fantastic views up the valley to the southeast, and down the valley to the north. As it was, we had a different spectacular view: a huge grey cloud, shaped like an Imperial Battlecruiser, drifting inexorably down the valley from our left, and lining up a collision with the equally grey, less-shapely cloud bearing in from our right. The wind was whipping across the peak, and as the town below disappeared from view we jumped in behind a ridge of rock to have a snack out out of the chill breeze. It was still cold there in the lee of the rock, and we were shaping to depart when what we initially took for a pair of really ugly monkeys appeared, up the slope from our vantage and heading our way in a series of leaps from boulder to boulder. As they got closer, their faces became clearer, and we realised we were staring down the barrel of a pair of Hoary Marmots (I kid you not). Each was predominantly black and dark grey, but had an orange back-end; one just tail, hind legs, and lower back; the other to its midriff. They looked like they'd been held by the head or the forepaws and dunked tail-first into a vat of orange dye****. They moved as a team, with one establishing station where she could see the surrounding area before the other moved past her and into position further ahead. Kind of like a police SWAT team securing a building, only with more fur and less guns. We watched until we started to shiver, then scared the bejeebers out of the poor wee things by standing up well within their secure perimeter and striding away to where we'd left the bikes. Reckon there might've been an acrimonious, recriminatory conversation in the Hoary Marmot household over dinner.

It had been a pretty magical experience, but in a purely physical sense it had left us cold. Really cold. Riding back down the fire road across the exposed face above the tree-line didn't help, and by the time we found an entrance to the singletrack we were not having much fun, with feet and hands like blocks of ice to the point where we couldn't tell if we were clipped in to our pedals and holding handlebars or not. The trail was pretty sweet, and we agreed later that it would have been a lot of fun if we were just a bit warmer.

As it was, though, neither of us trusted ourselves to ride much in the way of technical challenges, which was unfortunate as the trail provided many. Nothing too extreme under normal circumstances, but too much for us in our semi-frozen state. About halfway down we started to warm up, the trail opened out and grew less technical, and we started to ride fast. And sing, so that the bears wouldn't get a nasty surprise and eat us to assuage their fright or anger. It seemed to work, as we didn't have any bear encounters despite hearing large things in the trees nearby and smelling creature on more than one occasion. We did have a near-miss with a fallen tree, and were startled several times by birds exploding out of the undergrowth***** (one raven, a few grouse). At one junction we stopped to look at the trail options, and mused aloud "What manner of creature left THAT pawprint?" The response was immediate, loud, and absolutely frightening. It came from directly overhead ("Heck! Them bears are up in the treetops!") and was, we eventually figured out, the sound made when two trees are rubbed against each other by the wind, kind of like a giant cello. Only louder. When our heart-rates returned to somewhere near normal, we carried on, and were soon back at the van, where we attended to icy-cold feet and had a picnic lunch.

Eggy burrito deliciousness cures any ill.





* = mah-LEEN, apparently. Not mah-LINE as we'd been saying. Stupid French people.

** = Three separate groups, all of whom had set off from Maligne Lake, 40+km away, either three or four days previously. They'd teamed up to go over the Notch, which is a high mountain pass where, when they reached it, the snow was both flying and lying deep on the ground, obscuring trail-sign. One group turned tail at that point, but the others, figuring they'd passed the halfway point of the hike, pushed on, and made it through without major difficulty. Sounded like a great hike, and both of us were envious.

*** = At one point I'd looked up to see Nene disappearing into a cloud-bank, and we'd had some pretty amazing vistas, where rows of tall straight dark green trees marched silently across the slopes and vanished into the cold grey haze far closer than they should. Very atmospheric, very moody, very Twin Peaks.

**** = Or, I guess, held by the tail and dunked into a pool of dark grey or black ink. But then they wouldn't have been able to breathe, and I can't imagine they were undead hoary marmots.

***** = Not literally exploding, just bursting****** out of the bushes.

****** = Not literally bursting, just moving fast from a standing start.