post up your camping pics

[dieseldawg142]

we got lucky, the smoke bugged off while we hit some of Yoho's beauty. Yoho is Cree for awe inspiring.

this river runs to a natural rock bridge. the noise of the water pounding down the hole into the crevass is deafening

[dieseldawg142]

the drive into Emerald lake, biggest lake in Yoho


and at Emerald

[dieseldawg142]

nice at Emerald, water is cold


heading to the spiral tunnels, and Takakkaw falls. i think it's again Cree, for magnificent

[dieseldawg142]

there is a few waterfalls on the way to Takakkaw, like Wapta falls

[dieseldawg142]

after a few miles you come around a corner and there it is. the Cree were right, it is magnificent...
second highest waterfall in Canada at almost 1300 feet, all glacier fed, twice this size in spring run-off


i made a 20 second vid of it. the sound is incredible, and i was trying to get it. i had to turn the volume down on the vid or it just overpowers the vid completely. was like standing beside a jet engine going full-bore, with loud thunder mixed in as rocks continuously are being washed down the mountain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRCwltPAzAk

[dieseldawg142]

Dawg in the Takakkaw river


some more Yoho waterfalls


Close Encounters?
looks similar to Devils Tower

[dieseldawg142]

lousy smoke is making an appearance again....

[dieseldawg142]

Lake Louise in Banff park


went on a half hour gondola ride...95 clams for the privilige....a coke in the lodge was $3....

[dieseldawg142]

they have enclosed gondola's and open chairs. son and me managed to talk wife into an open chair, which surprised me and which she regretted right away. she got a little panicky a few times, had to keep mellowing her out, but she stuck it out, even with a death grip on the bar...and this is only about 20-30 feet off the ground


she did manage to spot another prairie dog down there.


as we were coming to the top, spied a grizzly up the hill further they were herding off with a couple trucks. at the top of the lift your kinda in an electronic pen. they have an electrified fence and an electrified bear strip on the ground surrounding the lift to keep out the wildlife, it's actually a common thing grizzlies wandering onto the hill.
not the best, a long distance shot i had to blow up the size

[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!

[dieseldawg142]

would you belive there is actually another 10 000 foot high mountain in this pic? it really is in there somewhere....


world famous Bow lake.....bahhh!


again, here's what Bow looks like when you can actually see it...


the smoke was just a tad lighter going threw Kootenay park, spied a chopper trying to douse one of the hundreds of fires burning right now...

[dieseldawg142]

this white truck i expected to see hit the ditch. dont know if it was a new driver or a driver that just did'nt care. he never went wide on any corners. a couple times his trailer outside duals were riding in the ditch or suspended in mid air....
caught up to him where there is some heavy netting to keep rocks off the road


check it out, his trailer is riding the ditch


you can clearly see how he was not allowing for length on the corners, again the trailer is tracking towards the ditch...


spied this HEMTT M977 for sale. i think the sign said it could be yours for 40 g's, or maybe it was 140 g's...lol. there was 2 of them 4 sale


this smoke just is'nt quitting, after another 600 miles to home, we're still blanketed by heavy smoke....

[dieseldawg142]

so said the heck with va-cays, going to spend the rest of it just riding my quad around...i did go buy some new tires for the quad trailer yesterday, bigger and better, hope this wards off any more problems for awhile...need a vacation from all the problems been having lately....

woo-hoo!
four hundred bucks of bigger and better. went wider than the stockers, also went to a D load, weight capacity just went up 1600 lbs. i also like how there radials and are taller than the old bias that was on there. i can now switch to a 6" drop hitch in stead of a 8" drop. going to get the trailer shop to make some custom springs about 2-3 inches taller. should be able to go to a 2" drop hitch or so, make for waaaay easier and smoother towing, especially since the kid's new quad weighs 500 lbs more than his old one...
big'un tires


trailer sits a little over 2" taller now


and they fill up the wheelwells much better than the puny stockers...

[Zoomad75]

Looked like an adventure for sure. Bummer on the smoke though. We are getting haze/smoke from California here in Colorado too. Thankfully we got a lot of needed moisture and most of our fires are out now.

[dieseldawg142]

thanks Zoomad!
ya, our air advisory index is pretty much off the charts lately, and is supposed to get worse next week with some outflow winds....and no rain for at least another 2-3 weeks
hit the Thurston Loop again today wit the quads, not much chance of running into snow now..
we left the truck (and dawg) at Chipmunk Creek once more.
here's Chipmunk last June when we were up there......and a couple months later at the exact same spot


and dawg in Chipmunk cooling off..

[dieseldawg142]

seeing how we went at it from the north the last time, we started at the south end of the loop today instead. had a small breeze blow thru and cleared out the heavy smoke, still a little hazy, but i'll take it..

[dieseldawg142]

old 4runner. no idea how it got here, trail is atv track set and it's washed out in quite a few spots...


smoke is clearing a bit...


enough to see Mt Baker, a volcano in the northern part of Washington state

[dieseldawg142]

you can see how the smoke is just hanging in the valleys...

[Billhilly]

Hey Diesel,
Great pic's as usual. That's ALOT of fires you got going on over there! Almost unimaginable, sittin' down here. I was just reading Kimberly is on Evacuation Alert, 4500 people. Telegraph Creek having a tough run too. Stay safe!