Icefield

Short Version:
Mountains. Mountains. Mountains. We camp for free in a place where camping is expensive, and are told off by a squirrel.

Long Version:
We'd been told that the Icefield Parkway between Jasper and Lake Louise is among the most beautiful drives in the world, so we were pleased that the clouds, although still present, had lifted somewhat from where they'd been perched the previous few days (ie everywhere) just in time for our runsouthwards on this high highway. The Parkway has its own Park Gate, and its own officious gatekeeper lady. She was an arse.

The scenery wasn't, though, it was spectacular.

So many awesome mountains, of all shapes and sizes, from tall skinny spires (Mt Hilda) to huge agglomerated monstrosities (Cirrus Mountain*) and sharp, tilted ridges (Parker Ridge). Striations were clearly visible where snow still lay, and gave an inkling of the stresses the land here must have been under to twist and tilt such huge slabs of rock in so many different directions. There were several waterfalls, but more channels where water must flow in torrents during the spring melt, and the Weeping Wall, while still impressive, should probably be seen then for maximum effect. Every so often the clouds to one side or the other would part, revealing yet more mountains behind the front ranks, many just as grand and impressive as those which so dominated the valley through which the Parkway runs. Columns of rain marched about the place, and the general atmosphere was of mystery and hiddenness; we felt like very small intruders in a land of giants.

We bypassed the in-Park tourist towns of Lake Louise and Banff, and carried on through the extensive roadworks to Canmore, which was a coal-mining town up until the 1980s, after which it was a dying town, with the mine closed and no other industry operating. Then the Winter Olympics came to Calgary, and Canmore, 100 or so km up the hill, nestled in a spectacular notch between some incredible mountains, and within twenty minutes' drive of the National Park region, was picked to host the Nordic events: cross-country skiing and biathlon variants. Today, the town is thriving as a tourst destination; cheaper than its in-Park neighbor Banff and with more essential (ie non-luxury) services available. Some locals we spoke to bemoaned the tourism influence, others loved the town's revitalisation (and probably its continued existence), and the benefits that come their way from the tourists' disposable wealth. One of the bike shop guys was in the latter group, and offered to take us for a ride in the Nordic Centre's extensive network of XC bike trails, showing us the best ones and how to link them for maximum effect. We were a bit pooped, though, and told him if we weren't there that he shouldn't wait for us.

We weren't there. We were driving around, east of town, trying through sheer force of will to bring into being a campground anywhere near Canmore that didn't have a stupidly high nightly fee and a dearth of services to show for it. Our willpower must have been lowered by the cold of two days before, or maybe the Hoary Marmots stole it from us, because it looked very much like we were going to have to shell out $23 for the dubious privilege of calling a relatively-flat patch of ground home for the night, with bonus access to a vault toilet** (shared with vast numbers of other campers, some of whom were quite fat) and lots of noise from the very-nearby Trans-Canada Highway.
We almost did it too, but it just seemed so wrong that we had a crack at finding an illicit spot, and although the one we eventually settled on (and in) was still rather close to the highway, it had a banked-up off-ramp blocking much of the noise, and no other campers within coo-ee. Sweet.
HT powerlines overhead, but no worries, so long as they don't fall on us, and if they do we probably won't know much about it.
No toilet: no worries, we have a shovel.
4x4 track running right past our little patch of more-or-less flat ground, across a river, and up a near-vertical bank: no worries, no-one's going to be heading in there now, it's getting dark.
Angry squirrel, chittering and grumbling at us whenever we moved, spoke, or otherwise impinged on his existence: no worries, he's little, and if worst comes to worst we can throw fir-cones at him

The powerlines stayed up, and no information about toilets is probably the right information. The 4x4 that came past late at night, drove across the river and up the near-vertical bank was mildly (very) perturbing, but it came back out an hour or so later. Traffic noise wasn't too bad, and all in all we were well-pleased we'd opted for the dirtbag spot, despite the awesomeness of the 1940s pickup truck with matching trailer that would have been our closest camp-neighbor had we stayed at the Bow River campground.









* = We developed a regime where the passenger's task was to identify and point out the peaks we were passing, which made them somehow more substantial; once the thing was named, it seemed to stick in the mind more as an individual entity, rather than just another mountain. This system remained in place right up until the point where it was discovered that someone had been falsifying mental records through wilful misnaming of various peaks. Mt Angry ("Wow, I can see why they called it that - it looks really unimpressed!") was actually Mt Amery, and Circus Mountain ("I guess they called it that because it's such a crazy-looking rock - there's all sorts of different stuff going on, all at the same time") was really Cirrus Mountain. Grrrrrrrr.

** = Longdrop