Travel and Places: Alberta
[Under development 21 July 2006]
General
We visited Alberta in August
1993. Like most of the provinces in Canada,
Alberta is vast. Although we
drove a very long way, we saw only a tiny proportion of the province. I would
love to explore the Rockies and the foothills much more
extensively than our brief visit permitted. Neither did we visit Edmonton,
nor anywhere in the north of the province.
Royal Tyrrell Dinosaur
Museum, Drumheller
We loosely based ourselves in Calgary,
which as the rodeo capital of Canada,
was probably unwise for vegetarians. Driving north east, we headed out onto the
prairies towards Drumheller. I loved driving across
the prairies, although I guess that driving, and life
in general, must be tough in the winter. Our destination was the Royal
Tyrrell Dinosaur
Museum, which probably ranks as one
of the best dinosaur museums in the world. I have a degree in geology, and I
was captivated. My wife is a languages teacher, and she was fascinated. My
daughter, Jemima, was two years old, and she was enthralled. As well as
skeletons of dinosaurs, and reconstructed dinosaurs, there were huge quantities
of interpretation, including basic physics and biophysics, leading to how
experts can infer from dinosaur skeletons what is necessary to transform them
into reconstructions. From the museum, there is a trail out into the badlands,
to see some dinosaur fossil beds. The trail did not look very wheelchair
accessible, but my fantasy is that it looked much like the badlands scene at
the start of the film "Jurassic Park".
The museum is on-line at:
www.tyrrellmuseum.com .
Banff
From Calgary again, we drove
westwards along Highway 1. It was not long before the Rocky
Mountains were looming up like a towering wall around the garden of
the eastward-stretching prairies.
Banff is full of tourists, and
therefore offers most tourist amenities. There are hotels, including the famous
Canadian Pacific "Banff Springs Hotel"; I shudder to imagine its
overnight price. During the summer, the pressure on beds in Banff
means that prices can be high without any requirement to maintain quality. We
had not booked ahead, and were rather underwhelmed at
what we were able to find. Moreover, there was only one place (Coyote's) in Banff
which served proper vegetarian food. I wonder if the place is still under the
same friendly management. We went up Sulphur
Mountain in the cable car. (It was
called a gondala for some reason, even though in Europe
the term gondala is largely reserved for boats which
ply Venetian canals.) The view would have been excellent on a clear day, but as
it was misty when we went up, we sat in the cafeteria at the top, drinking hot
coffee and eating maple syrup pancakes.
Banff became famous because of
the hot springs, and they were worth
a visit. The open air swimming pool, supposedly fed by the hot
springs, might have been nice had it not been closed
for refurbishment: maybe it is open again, now. The short boardwalk nature
trail from the springs down to the lake was wheelchair accessible, but we saw
relatively little wildlife.
Bow Valley
and Icefields Parkway
The Bow Valley Parkway
was unspeakably attractive, surpassed further north only by the barren beauty
of the Icefields Parkway.
A wolf leapt out of the woods on one side of the road, and dived into the trees
on the other side, vanishing almost before we had time to register what had
happened. Somewhere, but nowhere in particular, before Lake Louise
we stopped off and walked a kilometre up a boardwalk to see some waterfalls. At
different places along the parkways we saw bears and elk. At Peyto Lake,
we were able to walk uphill on a metalled path in the middle of nowhere,
surrounded by some of the world's most stupendous scenery, with signboards
giving an interpretation of the landscape, fauna and flora.
We stayed overnight at the hotel near Saskatchewan
River Crossing. The hotel was built of wood, and the bar was full of people who could have successfully auditioned as extras in Northern Exposure. That night (13 August 1993) we were treated to the magnificent spectacle of a Perseid meteorite shower undimmed by streetlights. The next day we took snow-bus
trip up onto the Athabasca Glacier, a tongue of the
Columbia Icefield. The trip was unmissable:
the anticipation, the thrill of descending the precipitous morraine,
the journey out onto the ice, and then walking on the surface of 300 metres
(1,000 feet) of moving ice. Jemima's hearing aid dropped into a crevice, and
was lost for a while. A party of mountaineers had walked from the foot of the
glacier and were making their way up onto the Columbia Icefield.
At Jasper there was a jacuzzi,
and dreaming of being out on the glacier. Driving the journey in reverse was
poignant and beautiful.
Back in Calgary again, everything felt tame. We
visited the zoo, easy by public transport. Not a bad zoo, as zoos go, although
not as good as Toronto Metropolitan. We saw caged and captive animals of the same kind that we had
recently seen roaming free in the wild. Zoos are far from natural environments.
Surely there needs to be a reason which benefits the animal species if
creatures are to be taken out of their environment. Voyeuristic entertainment
is not a sufficient reason.
p.g.h@btinternet.com