post up your camping pics

[dieseldawg142]

bah! smoke is coming back. can barely see Lake Louise


Moraine lake was closed, which made Lake louise even more bloody busy than usual. we decided to try L. Louise later
a pic of Moraine lake my wife took back in 2002...


....and how it looks if you get some decent weather...


Lake Louise as well

[dieseldawg142]

we left Lake Louise, figured we'd stop by on the way back, and headed up Jasper park to the Columbia Icefield, largest non-polar concentration of glaciers.
the smoke is starting to get heavy now, wife don't like it, hard and stinky to breathe. we even had some lite ash drift down on us from somewhere
hard to see the scenery....

[dieseldawg142]

sure would have been nice to see some blue sky...


puppy p break at Waterfowl lake. can barely see the 10 000 foot mountain in the background...

[dieseldawg142]

there is mountain ranges all around us, but we can barely see just the foreground ones....


some wildlife on the road

[dieseldawg142]

ya, this blows. taste it just breathing-yucky...


after a couple hrs of driving in this soup, we came to the Icefield, just as smoky here too


the icefield is a whole bunch of glaciers, we're going up on the Athabaskan glacier. lots of scouring everywhere from the retreating glaciers...

[dieseldawg142]

the Athabaskan glacier has gotten smaller than the last time we were here. it has been receeding at 15 feet per yr, that's 256 feet it has shrunk since wife and me saw it in 2002, almost a mile in the last century. the glacier is 300-900 feet thick, and the whole icefield is approx up to 3000 feet thick. it's not white or "snowy", but full of dirt and rocks, is quite brown in appearance, and you get excellent traction on it. it also tastes fantastic, thousands of yr old pure water...and no, that is not cloud, ya, it's wildfire smoke
you do have to keep an eye out for fissures though, some tourists have actually died falling into them


find a fissure and drink up, look how blue and clear it is

[dieseldawg142]

they have terra-bus tours out onto the glaciers.
remember that expensive thing i mentioned earlier?.... it's $99 bucks each for wife and me and 50 clams for the kid, no way in hay i'm paying 250 bucks for a 15 minute ride onto the ice, we'll hike up thank-you....
they do look cool cruising around, there is about 2 dozen terra buses and they leave every 15 minutes, and there always packed, can you say gold mine?...lol
they have 66" terra tires and super low gearing, about 25 mph tops. there is a hill about 35 degrees or so they drive down to the glaciers, was cool watching them crawl up and down it with all the passengers hanging on the seatbelts


they recently built a Glacier Skywalk, very similar to the one at the Grand Canyon, a glass loop out over a 918 foot drop to the glaciers below. we wanted to go walk it, but that expense thing again. where the Skywalk is built used to be a vehicle pullout that anyone could look off of, now it's closed to the general public unless you pay a private company (think terra-bus company...) more big bucks for them to drive you to it and charge you to walk it...don't really have a problem with that, but it's just as expensive as the terra bus tour, and you have to buy the terra-bus tour as well, cause that's what they use to transport you to it...
we were going to keep going to Jasper, we wanted to ride the Jasper tramway again, we did it in '02, it's about twice the size and twice the height of the Lake Louise gondola, you can also take your dog on it, but we had already spent a grand 3 days in out of 5, and could'nt really see nothing because of the smoke and wifey was having laboured breathing because of it, not to mention there was a fire in the park heading towards Jasper
kinda a drag, gotten really expensive, and what's the use hanging around spending more money if you can't even see or appreciate the beauty-ness of the place....like our holidays last month, we again cut it short and headed home....
the smoke!...jeebus!