Thursday, June 30, 2022

Canadian Rockies - July 2022


 at Waterton Lake

Link to more photos. (View the photos individually to see the captions.)

When I did this trip in 2016, I wrote that I should have brought Victor. Now I did. He loved it. As before, we were lucky to have mild temperatures and no rain.

The itinerary had changed a little. With COVID complications for US border crossings, they had opted to omit Glacier National Park and instead added a few new sights near Waterton. (The border COVID rules eased just days before the trip, but the itinerary didn't change.) New stops were Red Rock Canyon and Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. I had never heard of bison jumps; the film there was very instructive. Peyto Lake was even more impossibly blue than I remembered (see the photos).

In addition to deer, we saw mountain goats, big-horned sheep and black bears (see the photos). The scenery was spectacular, although there were many trees that had burned and many that were damaged by mountain pine beetles.

Walking on Athabasca Glacier was fine, but Victor noted that we walked farther and did more on Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina in 2009

On my 2016 trip, no one told me about the triple continental divide at Snow Dome above Athabasca Glacier, where some water flows to the Atlantic, some to the Pacific, and some to the Arctic Ocean.