Rockies Road Trip
A country as huge as Canada, second in size only to Russia, would be expected to have a huge variety of landscapes to offer an explorer (whereas such variation in a small place like Georgia comes as much more of a surprise). There’s something to fit the temperament and aesthetics of each personality.
The province of Alberta, in which my immediate family has been based since 1981, is between the straight-horizon flatness of the Prairies and the very three-dimensional awe of the Rocky Mountains, part of the same chain which runs from Alaska to Patagonia, top to bottom of the Americas. Edmonton was near enough the starting point of a trip my wife and I were able to make south and west into the Rockies recently, thanks to the generosity of friends who lent us a trouble-free van to trek and sleep in.
Instead of going more or less due west to Jasper, we took a route recommended as much more beautiful: south-west via Ricky Mountain House and the David Thompson Highway. This got us into the mountains sooner, which was the whole point of the trip. Soon, forests hiding the views from the roadsides gave way to the peaks themselves, stretching out before us.
Having spent so much time recently either visiting or simply living among the mountains of the Greater Caucasus in Svaneti, I could not help but make comparisons between these two famous ranges. The Rockies are a much tamer drive, with smooth, multi-lane roads, many picnic or camping spots and convenience abound. The Caucasus makes you feel like you’re hugging the sides of mountains in your car, which for much of the way you in fact are, with a cliff up and another one down on either side of the narrow road; rock-falls from one side, river screaming by on the other. Choose your danger! At least Svaneti’s main road has been renovated recently enough to make it a much more pleasant experience, less bone-jarring.
But on the scale of the individual, walking around and through the mountains, the magnificence and dangers are equal. Weather up here can change suddenly; nights cool near to freezing even in mid-summer, and you can die just as easily of exposure in the “tamer” locations as you can in the “wilder” ones. Nature is pitiless of your stupidity, if you test Her.
We looked around Banff town, spent some time soaking in the Hot Springs, gave the $40 per person Banff Gondola ride a miss, saw a caribou in someone’s backyard. On to exquisite Lake Louise, glacially colored green waters back-dropped by mountains and glaciers rearing up to the sky. The Louise Chateau, currently priced from $600 to $1600 per night for a room, boasted equally beautiful and expensive art and fossils. Also, designer garments made from musk ox wool (so, collected from the wild), of which the cheapest was a simple headband for $95, and the most expensive were jackets of $1000 and more. So soft you could hardly feel them, and they must be so warm you would feel dressed in feathers.
Louise Overflow is nothing more than a parking lot for people who couldn’t reserve a “proper” campsite for their tent, tent trailer or bus-length RV, the numbers of which stunned my wife speechless. At $10 per night, however, it was fine for us, sleeping on a blowup mattress in the back of the van as we were. In the end, no one came around to collect our money, so we left the next morning after nine having had a peaceful, free night.
We only saw a tiny part of the Rockies in our sixty-odd hour, 1200-km trip, but it was enough to remind us both how such surroundings have the power to humble and simultaneously exalt the soul. I suppose I would call the next province west, British Columbia, the Abkhazia of Canada for having the best of all worlds: mountains, good subtropical fruit growing regions, and the ocean. If I was to settle back in Canada (unlikely at this point), I would choose to go there. Alberta’s winters, down to minus 40 C or F, are too harsh for me. But our mountains in this province are spectacular enough to impress. Mission accomplished.
Tony Hanmer runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1000 members, at
www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/ .
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
Tony Hanmer