Yoho - Lake O'Hara

My dear reader and unknown public, you're probably already sick of alpine lakes. But I have so many more. We're proceeding a little out of order now, mostly because I misclassified my photos. The parks kind of merge together and to the wildlife it's all the same.

We took a bus to Lake O'Hara in Yoho Nat'l Park. This is 10 miles in and you have to reserve the bus way in advance. You could also hike in, but I wasn't up for that.

From the lake, you can take other trails further into the mountains. The trail we picked took us by Lake Mary Schaeffer first. All these lakes have little melting glaciers attached to them, which you can't see in this picture because this glacier was almost all gone.

I also refer to this hike as the hike of death. It involved rockslides (see rocks below - that is the trail) and one cliff face. I like to post pictures of people because it shows we were physically present.

Lake Macarthur is the final destination, another cobalt blue lake with a glacier and wildflowers. Here C demonstrates that yes, you can swim in glacial water. It's very very cold. This lake is colder than Shadow Lake.

C took a fancy to photographing mushrooms. We have ~50 pictures of various types of mushrooms, but don't worry, I'll spare you the pain of sifting through them all.

This picture doesn't look like much, but it's a wilderness corridor. That's a natural bottleneck created by geography. Animals are forced to either walk through this corridor or take Hwy 1. I sat here for about an hour waiting for a bear to walk by, but none did. Grizzly bear season is between Aug 15-Sept 15, but we only saw 1 grizzly bear during our trip.
My bear story. So the day before we hiked to Shadow Lake, a grizzly bear sat on the bridge obstructing the trail. Various hikers who encountered the bear either ran or took pictures. Self preservation v preservation of your death in digital mode. I know I'd take pictures. But the bear didn't come out for me.

Jaspar - Columbia Icefields

Back on track, after Shadow Lake we went to the Columbia Icefields in Jaspar. Then back to Banff/Lake Louise. Then to Yoho and Lake O'Hara. You can see how I got confused.

Like a good tourist, we went on the Brewster bus to the Athabasca glacier. It's a bus that costs way too much to drive you up this glacier and then enclose you in an iced parking lot type surface so you can take pictures of each other.

As you can see, they marked off the safe area with cones. Glaciers in the summer are especially dangerous because they shift and you can fall into a crevasse and suffocate. I spent a previous day reading up on the Swiss rescue technique for people trapped in crevasses. Thus I felt like I couldtake this picture while risking my life, off the coned safety zone.

But away from the cones you can see the runoff and the crevasses carved by the waters.

An ice cave visible from the iced parking lot.

Alternatively, for no fee, you can hike a few miles up on the other side of the road and get a view of six different glaciers from Wilcox pass. Here's Athabasca glacier again, and you can see the road taken by the Brewster buses and the parking lot way in the distance.


From the pass we saw a herd of big horn sheep. C took this picture. It's unique because my lens and camera have no zoom capability. So the sheep is about 10 feet away from him. I was all ready to dive into the river, believing somehow that sheep can't swim.

Jaspar - Maligne Country

For a brief moment I thought I would spare the world from more picture of lakes. But then I thought, I'll spare you from the worst one. No pictures of Lake Minnewanka, the biggest and most cruise ship infested lake in Banff.

The tourbook recommended this place called Moose Lake where you can see Moose. Now, we saw a moose in Shadow Lake, but it was female so had no horns and really just looked like a giant horse. So I felt kind of cheated. Unfortunately, moose lake had no moose. It had rain and moose food under the water and some very loud tourists.

Near Jaspar town, we also stopped at Medicine Lake. It's a lake that rises and falls drastically with the seasons so that the indigenous people thought spirits resided within. It's got these little blue lines inside, I think those may be the sinkholes.
Next we visited Maligne Canyon. Legend has it that some French guy tried to take his horses across this canyon but the waters swept the horses away, so he was like, this canyon is Maligne!


It's really beautiful and narrow, so narrow at points that squirrels jump across. And packed with tourists during the summer season because it's close and accessible to Jasper town. Except this day.



Because as you can see, on our visit, it's raining pretty good. And that rain drives off the tour buses and Japanese women with designer handbags. Luckily we had ponchos.


Maligne Lake, the lake formed by the waters in the canyon, is also usually a top tourist destination with cruises out to a Spirit Island. I provided the wiki link/picture. It's one of the most photographed islands in the world. I, your avid photographer, did not photograph spirit island and in fact did not even get on the cruise to the island. The reason? It poured. We sat in the cafeteria with a tourbus full of old people and ate bowls of soup. I think the lake has a certain charm when it's shrouded in rainclouds.

Jaspar - Townsite

The Fairmount Jaspar Lodge, rooms ranging from unaffordable to super unaffordable, owns its own collection of beautiful lakes. Sidenote: Fairmount is a good hotel brand in western Canada. I tried all their restrooms. Quality.


For all its sophistication, Alberta is still oil country, it's like Texas north, complete with cowboys and "Alberta beef." The oil people decorated the lodge with an aquarium theme for a conference. Kinda odd.
Behind the town of Jaspar lies another network of recreational lakes. It's like their Mission Bay. This is Pyramid Lake, late in the day awaiting another storm.

We took a tram up to the top of some mountain where you get a view of the townsite. This is about 9am, as is a trend you may have noticed, we routinely hit the touristy spots early or late in the day. We have a clear shot of the town site, but the clouds add character.

From the tram station, C took a 1 mile hike up to the top of the summit for more views. I didn't wear the proper shoes that day so I had to stay behind. More shales. A 'moderate' hike is more like 'strenuous' to me.
From the town of Jaspar, tourists go to Maligne Lake, the tram, and hike to Angel Glacier. We did two and figure we'd do the third. We made it to the trailhead at about 10am and barely got a parking spot. This is Mt Edith Cavell. I think it's named for a nurse?

Angel Glacier and the lake it creates. The trail provides two options, up above the glacier but on the other side, and down at ice level. We did both.

The glacier could crack at any moment and kill you. Also, the bottom side is actually a very steep and very dense rockfield.

Here, we went off, way off the trail into the rockfield, past the 'do not enter or risk death' sign, to the ice cave. It funnels cold cold air out and is dark inside, not glowy blue like you see on tv. And if you went in, you would surely perish. My guidebook said that in the winter, when the ice is more stable, people go on ice hikes into waterfalls and glaciers and ice caves. I'd do that. Except for the death part.

Intermission

Assorted waterfalls #1: Sunwapta falls. It's got a mini spirit island.


Assorted waterfalls #2: Athabasca falls, right off the road, swollen with the rains. This is also late in the day so the crowds have dispersed.


Assorted waterfalls #3: Takakkaw falls - I'll spare you this one. It's a 900 ft waterfall we saw in the pouring rain.

Grizzly bear by the side of the road. They have to consume 300,000 bearberries to prepare for hibernation. The snows start in late Sept.


Mt Revelstoke Nat'l Park in British Columbia - Heather Lake + alpine meadows. This park is really small and the "alpine meadows" look color coordinated and produced. And ya, the lake is swampy brown.


Revelstoke townsite. The citizens begged for their own national park and finally got one, they refer to it as our national park. I remember that line straight off the plaque. But BC's much more into logging and exploiting its resources.


The drive to Vancouver, stopped in a town called Hope.

And that's it for glacial lakes...on to the cities

Victoria

From Banff, we drove to Kamloops. It's a town that looks a bit like Reno, desert based and overgrown + growing. Here's the thing with Kamloops...I've been there twice, once when my family went to Banff and again this trip. You don't get pictures in Kamloops. It's about 6-8hrs from civilization so you get there late, go to bed, and get up, and continue.

We also drove through Salmon Arm and then onto the ferry to Vancouver Island. I was unsuccessful in obtaining either Salmon Arm or Salmon King hockey jerseys.

I think we hit Victoria during a spell of rare good weather. This is C, a seaplane, and the sea.


Took a tour of the legislature building and had lunch in their govt subsidized cafeteria. I may have had fries several days in a row.

On display in the front is the giant golden mace of justice.
Victoria Harbor. We were so out of place in our hiking clothes. You can't get away from the masses here. For reference, the Fairmount Empress hotel is on the other side of the boardwalk.


I just had to include this picture. We stayed at an awesome golf resort hotel with C's starwood points. Now I don't know if golf can survive in a community that gets more rain than seattle, but they're investing very heavily in the resort + associated condos. And it was here that I had the best pasta ever...smoked salmon and caperberries.

Vancouver

We didn't spend that long in Vancouver, one full day, and in our time there, it rained one day and less so the next. I thought these rainguards are quite clever:

Olympic clock, vandalized on the other side the night before. Their colors are lime green and cyan and the vancouver2010 gear, vastly overpriced. Beijing gear came at a better discount, my one fuwa sweatshirt, my only souvenir.


The obligatory skyline (is this the skyline?) from Stanley Park. Every great city needs a mass of green to call its own park and every great city needs a defined skyline.

This island exists under the overpass and contains a public market to rival that in the Ferry Building.

No, I didn't miss Obama's speech. We finished our izakaya meal and rushed through the shopping district (hikers don't shop) to return back.

Lion's gate bridge. Like SF, you gotta drive through the park to get to the bridge. On the other side, far off, is Whistler where the actual Olympics will be held. According to the tourbook, it's also where the rich vancouverites live. Although I visited Richmond (Chinatown) and Vancouver non-shopping district, and it all looked pretty good. I think they have a higher standard of living.
And in the airport, waiting for my return flight, I looked down at customs for people entering Canada. They're all from Japan. The tourbook said Vancouver has more Japanese restaurants, and more izakayas than any other type of restaurant.

And so that was our vacation. We go places thinking of going just once, so it was a lifetime of alpine meadows, lakes and trailmix crammed into two weeks.

I've returned

Made it back safely from the great white north. Will post the pictures, the best ones, in some form over the next week.

It's 80 degrees inside my apartment with 80% humidity. It's sick. And the mailman lost (?) my mail.

It's Monday so I went to the beach

After cooking, post bar, next on my list is a visit to the beach. I'm going to show you a typical relaxing Yellowcat beach day.

First, have to stop by in Hillcrest to get my cheese sandwich from Breads & Cie. It's the default san diego bakery, has a complete monopoly, stocks the shelves in the Von's and Trader Joe's alike. Anyhow, their best sandwich is this cheese/pesto mix which sounds disgusting but is actually super good and a good small size.

San Diego puts up these crazy signs in all its districts. I kind of like it, it's a remnant of the 1970s and gives the city character.

Below - Mo's is a gay hamburger place. It's across the street from the anti-prop 8 headquarters, which is HUGE.

Then I drive across the Coronado bridge, which is 2 lanes/way, 3 lanes/other, and unlike bay area bridges, completely FREE. I took a walk all the way under the bridge, but then turned because the 9/11 bridge watch guy was there.

Finally made it to the beach. No beach trip is complete without a tour of the Hotel Del, wishing I was rich enough to stay there.

They've torn up the ballroom floor. You know what else got torn up? The floor of the convention center after Comic-Con. Wouldn't it be awesome if comic con was at the hotel?

Two hours of sun, back home. That's the good beach trip. The bad ones end up at Mission Beach, or even worse, Mission Bay =(

Post bar

I spent 3 nights in downtown taking the bar exam. Suffered through an earthquake, bad-mediocre downtown food, and took a total of 18 hours of testing. And ya, I'm worried I failed, worried a lot. You can't help it because you think you did well on some things, but then so did everyone else. Most people fail by only a few points. But I had a good time there.

My friend and I shared a room at the Hard Rock, it's a new hotel that opened just a year ago, right across from Petco Park. Ultra hip and modern. Rates aren't so bad because Comic Con just happened, and the exam's in the middle of the week. Here's a shot of the bathroom.

My bed.


Post-bar, after worrying about failing, I made a salad nicoise. I don't even have a plate enough to contain it all. The green beans are under the tuna. The best salad nicoise I ever had was in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. In this one I used canned tuna and added butter lettuce, unlike the recipe. It's very simple but very time consuming.


For dinner, my usual meal of fish, veggies, and crazy good wild basmti rice. Dessert's on the right, apple crisp. It's apple pie for those of us who can't do crusts.


So I'm still worried about failing, most people I spoke with are absolutely confident they passed. I think I did better on the essays than everyone else, and did well on 1 of the two performance tests, but I'm sure I failed the MBE. And from what I've seen, you have to pass the MBE to pass the exam =( I may be back in February, alone...