Rashers of bacon

View all our photos of Saskatoon here

The prairies get a bad wrap from other Canadians.  The general consensus is that they are flat and boring, although a lot have never actually been to the middle of their country.  Those that have tell of days of monotonous driving across not featureless but drearily similar landscape stretching into forever on the horizon.  We certainly got a taste of this in Calgary with a couple of day trips out of the city.  Days and days of dead straight roads and flat farmland does not sound like the ideal road trip.  But the flatness in itself is a talking point.  Just how flat is it?  The jokes are that you can see your dog run away for three days or that you can see tomorrow coming.  In a way I was looking forward to this extraordinary flatness.

Imagine my disappointment to find hills in our first prairie town, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  We hired cruiser bikes to ride along the big river that flows through town and I can assure you, it wasn’t dead flat.  Even Saskatoon’s most interesting feature, its flatness, is a let-down.

So without the flatness to fall back on you would think that Saskatoon had absolutely nothing going for it, but thankfully for us visitors that isn’t the case.  It’s not the kind of place you would make a special trip for unless you were visiting family or a friend as we were.  There are no big name attractions that you simply must see.  This made it tricky for our host, Calvin, as what do you do to impress a couple of travellers who have arrived via Vancouver and the Rockies.  It’s a tall order.

What Saskatoon lacks in spectacular scenery, or even scenery that is interesting in its dullness, is the feel of a happy and liveable city with beautiful old trees.  The view from Calvin’s apartment on the eighth floor near the river is a blanket of green treetops.  Of course, the view probably isn’t so appealing in the depths of winter when it can get to -30 celcius.  Saskatoon is a pretty town with a beautiful old University and quaintly picturesque suburban streets.

Even without big-name attractions we had the most fun at the Saskatoon Western Development Museum here.  They have done an incredible job of recreating an old west style street that you can wander around and through to get an old fashioned virtual reality tour of what Saskatoon used to be like.  In feel in reminds me of the ramshackle museum in Gulgong which they have filled with assorted random old stuff.  Unlike Gulgong they have built appropriate houses to show their random collection of old stuff and organise it so that it makes sense in its context.  When we were there they even had a trainee blacksmith making nails which they give to school kids as a keepsake.  Sarah was so smitten with the whole process that he made a nail for her which she promptly put in her handbag.  We joked at the time that we would have to remember that before going through airport security but of course we forgot about it.  Security found it for us, bless them.  I guess we should be thankful we weren’t in the US.

The museum also had a full-size steam engine and historical tractors and farm equipment, all lovingly restored to their former glory.  This is a farming community after all.  The information just kept coming and coming.  Sarah has never met an information board she didn’t like, and to be fair it was well presented and interesting.  I’m just glad there was a life-sized combine harvester cockpit with a harvesting game inside which kept me amused for five minutes.  At a certain point in museums my brain puts up the ‘full’ sign.

The other attraction Calvin organised for us was a visit to his friend’s farm on the outskirts of town.  The outskirts are only about 15 minutes drive from the centre of town and just off the main road was Calvin’s friend’s farm.  The farm has chickens, guinea fowl, pigs, sheep, a ram and a dog.  The dog had no control over the ram who blatantly stole grain intended for the pigs.  In fact, the sheep trotted after the grain wherever we went, even going so far as to attempt to stick their head in the grain bucket as it was being filled up.  The spoiled ram was the alpha male, as his low, throaty baa attested to.  Sarah did stare him down on one occasion but scooted out of his way on others.  The dog was useless.

That would have been it for Saskatoon if not for the Park Cafe, an old-style diner in the seedy part of town.  I have mentioned it before but any mention of Saskatoon would not be complete without mention of the Bacon Breakfast they dished up.  Three types of bacon (count ’em) with tasty hash browns and egg.  I will always love Saskatoon for that breakfast if nothing else.

For more mountain photos head to these galleries:  Sicamous, Sicamous to Banff, Banff and Columbia Icefields tour

This will be a simile-laden post because it’s about The Rockies, and the only way to even attempt to convey their grandness is through comparison to something else.  Even the copious photos we have taken don’t fully convey the grandeur of the scenery.  You can’t stuff the feeling of being amongst those mountains into a little photo, even if it does paint a thousand words.

We last left you in the dry landscape around the Okanagan Lake heading north through Peachland.  Of course we had to try the local peaches which we can attest are plump and juicy with Canadian water.  As you head north through the Okanagan valley the land becomes greener and the ubiquitous trees thicken.  Pretty little farms and quiet villages line the lake with the occasional larger, more industrial town, including Kelowna where the Bacon brother was shot and killed.  We didn’t stop there.

We were looking for a place to stay for the night to break up the drive to Banff.  Revelstoke had been the plan but seemed a bit far now after lunch.  Salmon Arm had been suggested, a strangely named place a little off our chosen path.  So that’s how we found ourselves in a faux log cabin in the tiny town of Sicamous (pronounced by us like “I’m a sick a moose”, even though we hadn’t seen *any*).  There’s not too much to say about Sicamous.  It seemed like a perfectly pleasant place on the lake where highway 97A meets the trans-Canada number one highway.  The freight train rattles through pretty regularly as well, but for all that it’s not industrial and was filled with Canadians on holiday, fluttering about in the brief summer like fleeting butterflies.

The drive to Banff the next day was incredible.  There are mountains everywhere in British Columbia but they are taken to an entirely new level when you approach the Rockies.  Previously big mountains dwarf into hills in the face of these towering and craggy mountains permanently capped with snow.  They rise out of the ground like shark’s teeth going back in rows, waves of mountains cresting the horizon as far as you can see.  After a while the immensity of the scenery overloaded my brain’s visual cortex which began throbbing with the amount of scenery it was been asked to process, much like watching a 3D movie at IMAX.

We broke up the scenery a couple of times with walks into the wilderness.  Well really we just wandered off the highway on trails, but it’s amazing how quickly you can be enveloped in the forest, especially when there is a gorgeous little waterfall with crystal clear water surrounded by lichen-covered trees and moss underfoot.  The Canadian woods are so crisp and fresh that even the dull-witted mozzies that lethargically alighted on us couldn’t break the spell.

Banff itself is a cute little town completely dwarfed by the mountains around it.  The tourist laden and chain store riddled main strip is the only negative, but we weren’t there to go shopping.  I saw some classic tourist driving in the Tim Hortons parking lot.  A woman was standing behind a car to let the driver know how far till the curb.  She started waving her arms to signal “stop” but the driver stamped on the accelerator instead and mounted the curb.  Apparently there is a lot of damage done to buildings in Banff by the massive RVs that people drive around.  Backing one of those beasts into a parking alpine parking lot leads to a lot of unintended consequences which the corner of the hostel could attest to.  You don’t need a special licence to drive those things, even though they’re not much smaller than a semi-trailer.

In Banff all the casual workers look like snowboarders.  The guy at the greyhound station, the guy driving the recycling truck, they all look like they’re just killing time waiting for winter to start.

The hostel was in a beautiful spot next to the river with mountains in the background.  The view from the window of our private room was gob-smacking.  It was a fantastic place to lean over the window sill and do some stretching.

The next day we warmed up with a stroll to the top of Tunnel Mountain which is walking distance from the centre of town.  The real action came later in the day when we drove to Lake Louise, one of the most postcard-perfect places I’ve ever seen.  The startlingly blue water has a glorious glacier covered mountain as a backdrop.  The snow sitting on top of the mountain looks like thick icing on a cake that has been sliced off.  Obviously the word got out about this place because there were quite a few other people taking the same pictures as us.  We managed to escape the crowds with the cunning tactic of walking uphill which doesn’t occur to all that many tourists.  We walked a 7.4 km return track from Lake Louise called Saddleback which goes straight uphill the entire time with matching views.  This is grizzly bear country as several signs warned so I whistled badly and Sarah clapped her hands (the idea being that bears don’t like bad whistling all that much and clapping even less).

The next day Sarah went on to Calgary while I stayed on to do a tour of the Columbia Ice Field (which Sarah has already seen).  The Ice Field highway is reputed to be one of the top ten drives in the world.  I don’t know how they judge these things but it is impossible to imagine more stunning scenery than what rolled past the window that day.  Huge mountains and perched above impossibly blue lakes just kept on coming.  It is truly breath-taking.  The main objective of the tour was to take us to the Columbia Ice Field which is a 325 square kilometre patch of ice sitting above the mountains which feeds a number of huge glaciers in the area.  I *was* going to link to a more detailed explanation of what a glacier is but really, they are just large patches of ice and snow that don’t melt in the summer.  Some are a lot bigger than others and can have a big impact on the mountains.  The effect of ice the height of the Eiffel tower pressing down on the rock grinds it into a powder called rock flour which filters down into the lakes giving them that brilliant blue colour.

I took a tour up to the Columbia Icefield which stopped at one gorgeous spot after another.  A coach drives to the base of the Athabasca glacier where you then transfer to a specially made truck for driving on the ice.  As we got of the coach one woman was nervous about the cold complained to the coach driver about needing a jacket.  She exclaimed of her friends “They’re from Miami!”.  Without missing a beat the coach driver replied “A little bit of cold never hurt anyone”.  Not strictly speaking true but I liked his Canadian spirit.

You drive up towards the glacier past stunted pine trees which are 300-700 years old, even though they look the size of a Christmas tree.  Conditions are so harsh up here in winter that the trees don’t get much of a chance to grow.  The katabatic winds that blow off the glacier mean that some trees only have pine needles on one side.

The ice trucks are beasts.  Six wheel drive with massive, under-inflated tyres.  There are 23 in existence, 22 here and 1 in Antarctica.  They slowly grind there way up to the middle of the glacier.  The glacier is formed by ice spilling out from the Columbia Ice Field.  The ice squeezes down past the mountains.  Imagine the mountains are fingers and the glaciers are the ice squeezing between the fingers.  The glaciers move down the slopes at a minimal speed each year (about the thickness of a postcard).  Unfortunately the glaciers have been in retreat for decades now due to warmer winters and a lack of snow to replace them and are retreating metres each year.

Being in the middle of the glacier is like being in nature’s cathedral.  It inspires awe in a greater power, the power of nature.  There is something humbling about being confronted with the result of millenia of plate tectonics and glacial erosion.  There is something equally scary about seeing the rate of retreat of the glacier in such a short time caused by human activity.

When the summer season ends on the glacier they mark the road out with long metal poles.  During winter up to 8 metres of snow falls and if they don’t mark out their route they lose it completely.  At the start of the season they clear the snow and grade the road again, checking for crevices as they go.  Part of the drive up the glacier is on what appears to be a dirt road, but in fact it is just a covering of dirt on the ice.  The mountains nearby have land slides that cover the ice and cause it to melt more slowly, like being covered with a blanket.  The glacier is constantly changing.

Driving back to Banff you suddenly notice all the evidence of glaciers carving out the mountains, then you realise that the entire valley you’re driving through was probably once carved out by a massive glacier as well.  It’s truly epic scenery.

For more mountain photos head to these galleries:

Sicamous

Sicamous to Banff

Banff

Columbia Icefields tour