ASSEMBLY Required

Day Zero—Monday August 1—Jasper, Alberta 

55 degrees at 7 am, thunderstorms with blue sky coming in from the west

We made it! Our bikes and bags were among the first off the plane (Air Canada is my new fave). Everyone healthy and in good spirits.

Mark and Noreen at the end of a very long travel day.

The stretch of road (via bus) from Edmonton Airport to its city limits was forgettable—the unfortunate result of thinking that all people want is wide roads and mall after mall with the same chain stores that generically have metastasized our suburbs and exurbs. No rub on Edmonton:  it’s a global strip mall pandemic, pardon the reference.

 

Rte 16 from Edmonton to Jasper became increasingly more agricultural and then gave way to healthy black spruce (think Dr. Seuss pine trees) and birch forests covering rolling hills and long views into expansive valleys.

By the time we got near Hinton, AB we could see the outline of the Rockies in silhouette backlit by a western sun still high in the sky at 7:30 pm. From there our jaws dropped as we passed by the first real mountains and grey-green rivers fed by glacier/snow melt.  These mountains, sentinels for millennia, seems younger, sharper, and more dynamic than their southern counterparts in Colorado (will have to learn more about the geology).

Jasper is a smallish town.  Without the backdrop of these mountains it probably would seem rather mundane. But it’s home for two nights and seems like a friendly place, though somewhat overrun by people like me!

 

Task today: assemble the bikes, pick up a few remaining supplies, do a little sightseeing if we have time, grocery shop.  

 

And then get going up the Icefields Pkwy tomorrow morning on the first day of a 60 day journey.