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* "What I did on my summer vacation"

Apologies for not having kept up with my usual Tuesday blog entry for the past couple weeks. Lisa & I got our summer vacation out of the way right on schedule with the solstice this year, leaving June 20th and returning at the end of the month.

As we will soon be moving from the Pacific Northwest back to North Carolina, we decided to check out some of the beautiful areas of this region that we'd not yet visited during our three years here together. After taking a ferry to Victoria and then another to Vancouver (where our frequent ND contributor Mike Usinger, music editor of Vancouver's alt-weekly the Georgia Straight, kindly welcomed us to town), we headed east toward the continental divide and the Canadian national parks of Jasper and Banff, to be followed by our own country's Glacier National Park in Montana.

Banff is of course a world-class ski destination in winter, and still a beautiful area in the summer (highlighted by the spectacular Mt. Rundle), but we found its downtown to be not at all what we had in mind for a remote mountain getaway. Jasper, on the other hand, pretty much blew us both away, from the moment we saw a wolf on the roadside on our way in to the two days we stayed in the ideally rustic Miette Hot Springs Bungalows to the full day of driving along the Icefields Parkway experiencing everything from a glacier-up-close hike (Mt. Edith Cavell) to a ferociously overpowering river chasm (Athabasca Falls) to a veritable blizzard just three days after the summer solstice (at the Icefields Centre). My sentimental favorite scene was the Endless Chain Range, which I believe should be rechristened the Bob Ross Mountains, given their striking similarity to the slanted peaks the late PBS painter frequently creates on his canvas:

A hike at Lake Louise (our third of five straight hiking days) rewarded laborious uphill exertion with terrific views from a fully-operational teahouse at the top (we had the hot chocolate and the peanut butter powerballs), amid a meteorological smorgasbord that included sun sparkling off the waters of Mirror Lake to sleet flurries when we reached the teahouse just a few minutes later. The weather changed frequently and dramatically over the first few days of our trip, but calmed considerably when we reached Glacier Park, enough to produce this postcard-esque sunrise photo:

While at Glacier we basically shifted gears from hiking to watersports (canoeing on Swiftcurrent Lake, motorboating on Lake McDonald, whitewater-rafting on the Flathead River), finally returning home via the spectacular North Cascades along Highway 20, where we had a fascinating encounter with a vintage-camera photographer named Bruce Turner who was poised to hopefully capture a spectacular shot at the Washington Pass overlook:

We finally returned the same way we began, via ferry, from Whidbey Island back to our home on the Kitsap Peninsula. Along the way we listened (just to add the obligatory musical content) to new stuff from Peter Case, Mary Gauthier, Linda Thompson, and Erik Friedlander, among others...and our instrumental favorite for crossing this part of the country, "Northern Plains" by George Winston.

Now, on to those giant tubs full of mail with even more new stuff awaiting....

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on July 3, 2007 11:53 AM | Permalink