Tag Archives: Holiday travel

A River Runs Through It

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Sunday 11 September 2022 – I promised you photos of the magnificent edifice that is the Fairmont Macdonald Hotel in Edmonton, and you shall have them.

The hotel is something of an anachronism. Edmonton is just this city, you know? High rise offices and apartments; obviously a workmanlike rather than a stylish city.  And then you have the Macdonald.

The historic and impressive hotel, named for the first prime minister of Canada Sir John A Macdonald, was built as an early 20th century railway hotel (like so many of the Fairmont portfolio) and occupies a commanding position overlooking the North Saskatchewan River that runs through the city. But, as you can see, it is dwarfed by the modern high rise buildings that tower over it. If you ignore them (and this is easy to do whilst seated on the patio, glass in hand, because the bulk of the hotel is between you and the towers), it’s a very pleasant oasis; we certainly found it very comfortable, and it was a pleasure to sit out on the patio. It overlooks the hotel gardens

which it is nice to wander through, and one gets a decent view looking south over the city’s suburbs.

We had only a single day in Edmonton with no formal items on the itinerary, so there was nothing for it but to go for a walk. Obviously. The river runs through a valley – unimaginatively called the River Valley – so it seemed only reasonable to go and explore that area.

Just by the hotel is something excitingly called a “funicular”, and technically that’s exactly what it is – a railway running up the side of a hill. However, I lived in Stockholm (Sweden) for many years (many years ago, now) and even then many of the the underground stations had a lift that simply ran beside the escalators that most people used. The Edmonton funicular is very reminiscent of that; if it ran vertically instead of at an angle, it would simply be a lift. You can see it on the left of this photo.

It leads down to a platform, the Frederick G. Todd Lookout, which gives good views along the river. From there, it’s easy to walk to the Low Level Bridge, seen here in the foreground

(there are a lot of bridges across the river, rather like Newcastle upon Tyne.)

We had a lovely encounter with an eccentric as we started to cross the bridge.  The eccentric, by the way, was a yellow labrador dog, called Lollipop.  Her owner is a chap (originally from Montréal, not that this is relevant beyond the fact that he identified us as being from the UK rather than Australia) who one might think was taking her for a bit of exercise whilst he cycled along.  The reality appeared to be the other way round; Lollipop had so much energy that she positively pulled him along.  He said that she could pull him for 35 kilometres on the bike, and, looking at the extraordinary energy emanating from this dog, I could believe him.  They had first accompanied us down on the funicular and Lollipop was panting as fast as a watch ticks – about five times a second, I reckon.  I was worried that she was over-exercised, until we saw her running, leaping, swimming and begging for more things to run after. I have never, ever, seen a dog with so much dynamic energy.

We pottered across the Low Level Bridge, which gives a nice view of one of the other bridges, the Tawatina Bridge, as well as the Edmonton Queen sternwheeler riverboat.

The Tawatina Bridge looked interesting, so we headed that way along a trail through the park, getting a closer look at the riverboat,

and, through the sort of serendipity that only aimless wanderers can achieve, had a wonderful half hour around the bridge, which is a double level, rail and pedestrian bridge. For a start, you get another view of the riverboat, hotel, lookout and funicular;

and the view along it is interesting

with some nice artwork on the ceiling.

There was a lot of noise, which came from a crane that was doing something mysterious on the river bank.  We stopped to watch, intrigued by bubbles coming up near the crane’s bucket,

which turned out to be from a diver who was attaching the cable to things to be extracted from the riverbed.  The appearance of the bicycle elicited a small cheer from the observers! It was great to work out what was going on, but it was only a few hundred yards later, as we left the scene, that we realised that we had never actually established why this was happening.  Anyway, we retraced our steps to the Low Level Bridge and carried on along the trail, which went through a park engagingly called Nellie McLung Park.  We had seen another interesting bridge further along the river

and wanted to explore it.  As we wandered, we had some nice views of the city of Edmonton, which is very colourful on a sunny day.

As we approached this bridge (which is the Walterdale Bridge, by the way),

we saw signs for “EMBFEST”.  I wondered whether the EMB meant “embankment”, but it turns out that that it stands for “Edmonton Mountain Bike“.

Having watched for a bit, we carried on to the Walterdale Bridge itself

and walked across, with the vague objective of finding our way back to the hotel past the City Legislature.  On the walkway underneath the bridge on the north side are two cryptic numbers.

These show the flooding levels in two particularly dramatic years.

At this point it was clear that we’d dropped down rather a long way, as the city was by now well above us; Jane had worked out that the Legislature was just where the city’s High Level Bridge debouched onto terra firma.  We headed, therefore, towards it and the one beyond it

which is another multi-level bridge, the Dudley B. Menzies Bridge (are you taking notes? There may be a quiz later), which itself gives some good photo opportunities.

If you’ve managed to follow this thread, you’ll know that we had, somehow, to get back up to the level of the main city.  Apart from calling a cab, the only route appeared to be

this one – the gloriously-named Royal Glenora Stairs. This staircase appears to be somewhere where people go to work out

and it certainly is hard work to get to the top.  in order to keep you all informed of the scope of my suffering, I started counting the steps until Jane pointed out that some kind soul had actually written numbers every ten steps, all the way up. Unfortunately, there has been a mishap with the counting as, by the time you get to the top, there are  competing versions of the truth.

Whatever, we were glad to get to the top.

We passed by the Legislature, an impressive building which was, sadly, covered with scaffolding and other signs of repair work being undertaken. I’ve done my best to disguise this in these photos.

Then we started to head back towards the hotel.  The hotel address is 100th Street, and we saw that avenue numbers for the Edmonton grid was also in the high 90s.  It would have been great to get some kind of photo of 100th Ave crossing 100th St, but sadly reality doesn’t permit this. The area generally seems to have a heritage component

but we didn’t find explicit explanation for this beyond the fact that 102 Ave leads past the Archives and the city museum.

As we reached the hotel, there was another statue of Robert Burns.  We’re not quite sure why, but this statue is directly outside a hotel called MacDonald, so the two may be linked. Google hasn’t helped me find out why Canada and Burns are particularly linked.

Jane had found something she particularly wanted to see, but it had to wait until after dark.  In order to entertain ourselves until then, we allowed Tyler once again to entertain us with courteously and efficiently-served drinks and a late lunch.

After dark fell we tottered out in search of the intersection of 104th Street and 104th Avenue.  In doing so we passed an engaging clock outside the Westin Hotel

and a couple of buildings which would probably have looked very ordinary in daylight, but which were attractive in the dark.

Eventually, we reached our objective – the Neon Light Museum, which had its external display switched on.

All these are signs from the 1960s which were donated to the Edmonton City Council, who eventually settled on a location to set them up as a tourist attraction.

The walk back went past other nice lighting,

a striking mural

and a quirky display of light boxes.

So my description of Edmonton as being merely workmanlike is a bit dismissive.  Our hotel does its bit to bring colour to the scene as well,

and so, all in all, we had a very agreeable day in Edmonton – sunshine, agreeable temperatures and some interesting things to see. I don’t know how much more the city might hold for tourists, and we certainly won’t find out, as we have to leave sharpish the next morning to get to Toronto.  That will be a day almost entirely taken up by travel, and thus not good material for an entry in these pages.  However, Toronto should be a splendid place for tourists like us to wander round and gawp at things, so please come back in a couple of days and I hope I will have interesting stuff for you to read.

 

Jasper, Much Maligne’d

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Saturday 10 September 2022 – In declaring yesterday’s rest day to be the End of Part II of our grand odyssey, it turns out I was a bit previous; we still had a little bit of Rocky Mountain-style business (i.e. lakes, waterfalls, that kind of thing) to attend to. Also, since we had failed to visit Jasper, we thought we should at least go in and see what was the state of affairs there.

Accordingly, we set out towards Jasper. As we drove the short distance in, we saw something a little out of the ordinary:

a helicopter carrying a bucket. There was no smoke visible, but we guessed that this was attending to some wildfire business or other – see later. We also saw a temporary roadside sign on the highway which said “Power out In Jasper. Do Not Stop”, but we ignored that.

We went in to the town, wondering whether there was any power to any of the infrastructure. Having parked the car, we discovered that at least the parking meters had power – of course they bloody would – and spent a few minutes negotiating with one. It looked like we’d chosen the station car park.

There were plenty of cars parked in the car park, but the roads were very quiet for a Saturday morning.

Some of the shops seemed to have the lights on, so we popped in to one of them, a tourist gift-type shop, and pretended to look as if we were going to buy something in order to ask the shopkeeper for his assessment of the situation. He said that most businesses now had their own generators and were open, with the main exception being some hotels and restaurants, which had not re-opened; we made a mental note of this to update Brendan later.

Jasper is an attractive place;

the downtown has some nice buildings and some street art on display, too.

It did seem that many businesses were operational, but there was a variety of generator solutions on display and a pervasive hum

and not every business was open.

However, there were a few people about in the attractive downtown area.

Seeing the Tim Hortons, a Canadian coffee shop chain, we thought we’d try out the experience.

It’s a perfectly decent way of getting a coffee (and any manner of cake), but is workmanlike rather than classy. Whilst we were there, we did see evidence that there really was a town shuttle bus,

despite its non-appearance the previous day. Having reassured ourselves that Jasper was gradually getting back into the swing, we headed back to the car, past a streetcar that was handsome, but looked somewhere between faded and disused.

(We saw it in operation later in the day, so it’s not disused, at any rate.)

Right: onward to the last bit of Rocky Mountain stuff, then. There’s a road out of Jasper which leads past two lakes, Medicine Lake and Maligne Lake; both of which are fed by the Maligne River, which in turn feeds into the Athabasca River. Going along this road brings you first, though, to Maligne Canyon, which was therefore our first stop. As you drive the road towards it, there are signs off to “Sixth Bridge” and “Fifth Bridge”, and this starts to make sense once you see the trail map in the canyon car park,

although not much sense; it has to be said that this trail map is somewhat confusing. We saw a signpost to “Second Bridge”, so we thought we’d better start somewhere. We walked from Second Bridge to Fourth (which did need repainting, actually) and back, and then, because it would have taken too much time to go further, back up to First.

We covered a couple of miles, which was much more than I’d expected – I’d thought it would be something like the Mistaya Falls we’d seen on our Icefield Parkway drive. The idea was the same – a torturously twisted canyon carved out by a fast river – but this was much bigger. I’ve tried to condense the trail from start to Fourth Bridge in a video:

it’s an engaging hike, unsurprisingly quite popular.

Next up: Medicine Lake. As we approached, we passed an area which had clearly been affected by wildfires.

Medicine Lake has a viewpoint at its north end

and close examination of everything on the right bank from that viewpoint showed that it had been severely burnt and fairly recently, as there was little evidence of regrowth. Looking back up the lake from the other end

showed that there had been some fire damage to the other bank, too.

We pressed on to Maligne lake, and it became clear that things were, erm, not clear; the visibility was very poor, and we assume that this is because of smoke from the fire that has affected Jasper so badly.

When visibility is good, Maligne Lake looks to be a wonderful place to visit – see my brother Chris’s blog post that includes their visit here – but there was nothing really to see here, and time was beginning to press, so we headed back to the main road that would take us to Edmonton, our next stop. We spotted the same bald eagle’s nest that Chris had

and also some roadside wildlife in the form of bighorn sheep which were wandering about, eating some of the scenery.

That really did conclude the Rocky Mountain section of our holiday. As we motored on towards Edmonton, the scenery changed. Interestingly, though, there was still the danger of wildfires and smoke – signs by the roadside warned of the possibility; and we even saw a wildfire in progress in the distance

and the knock-on effects of the smoke.

Soon, though, the scenery flattened out and we just motored on relatively flat roads towards Edmonton. The main interest in the drive for me was my gaming the Lane Assist function available on our rental car so that it didn’t realise I only had two fingers on the steering wheel, and trying to move into the overtaking lane before the adaptive cruise control slowed us down. I know how to have fun at the wheel of a car.

There were a couple of possible digressions on the route, but we ended up diverting only to one of them, the intriguingly-named “Beaver Boardwalk” in Hinton. It actually does what it says on the tin; there’s boardwalk and it leads past the evidence of beavers, erm, beavering: a dam;

and a lodge (we think).

The place is quite a nice diversion

but it seems that it needs some TLC – some of the boardwalks were closed, and others needed some attention. It borders on other terrain in the Maxwell Lake area, and this is obviously a place where people can walk and bike around, and where there is significant wildlife. I found it amusing that somewhere that tells you what to do when attacked by a cougar

or a bear

could, erm, bear this name:

So, refuelling aside, our next stop was to be Edmonton. We were a bit disconcerted to see this sign

as we thought we’d left Jasper far behind.*

In Edmonton, we encountered a slight issue that one doesn’t come across so much whilst driving in the UK these days.

Despite these slight visibility problems, and with help from the satnav, we found our hotel, the impressive edifice that is the Fairmont Macdonald (pictures tomorrow). It was past 7pm by this stage and so we forsook any actual unpacking or such domestic admin to head straight down to the restaurant which featured a patio. This was lovely.

We were expertly served by Tyler, who was clearly a seasoned campaigner (emphasis on the “camp”, but assured, courteous and expert), after which we tried for some after-dark photos in the hotel’s garden.

— GEEKY PHOTO ALERT —

The hotel has a nice view over a suspension bridge which is illuminated. There was a low, full moon of a beautifully muted hue, which I tried to capture on both my mobile phone and my Big Camera. The difference between the two is striking:

The top was my mobile phone, the bottom the Nikon. The mobile phone photo is a nicer scene, although it’s much noisier; but unless you need a technically high quality image, the mobile won this round.

— END OF GEEKY BIT —

That was it for the day. We have nothing planned for the morrow, so wandering about will be the order of the day. Come back and see what we found, won’t you?

* English comedian reference. Sorry.

Ice and No Fire

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Thursday 8 September 2022 – I hope you like photos of scenery, glaciers and waterfalls, coz there’s rather a lot of them here.  If so, please read on…..

As far as we could find out, there was no reason for us to avoid going to Jasper.  The news was that the entire town of Jasper was without power, but the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, we were assured, has its own generators, and the Icefield Parkway was, according to the Park’s Facebook site, still open.  So off we set.

Well, there was one thing we had to deal with first – sunrise photography.  I awoke at around 0630 without the necessity for an alarm call, and peeped out of the window to see whether conditions were going to favour mucking about with photography that morning.

That was an encouraging sight, so in between the various parts of getting up and packing ready to leave, I occasionally took a photo as the light developed.

At about 0715, a tiny breeze ruffled the surface of the lake

and I decided that I should hasten down to the shore to get a different viewpoint, preferably one without a bloody tree in the way (so Rocky Mountains, that) before the reflections dissipated.  I was down and by the lake in five minutes, by which time the scene had changed dramatically.

— ANOTHER PHOTO DIGRESSION; FEEL FREE TO SKIP —

Having zoomed in to take the shot above, I noticed that my camera was making some odd choices about the light.  This is the colouring it saw

which was greatly different from what my eyes were registering.  Its decision about colour balance (a very low colour temperature of around 4,500K) was different, in that zoomed-in shot, than it had been a moment earlier for the wider scene (around 10,500K).  I tinkered for a while with setting a different white balance on the camera, but settings of Sunshine and Cloud made no difference. In the end, I put the camera back on auto White Balance and adjusted the colour balance when processing the RAW image(s) in order to get nearer what the human eye (or at least my human eye) was seeing.  This is another reason for shooting in RAW – it permits adjustment of colour balance without losing any image data, which is not the case for jpegs.

— END OF DIGRESSION; WELCOME BACK —

By 0735, the light had developed to this

and I started looking around for different framings, such as a little foreground interest,

and then the breeze, which you can see ruffling the water in the distance in the above image, rose just enough to eliminate reflections, signalling the end for me (and the dozen or so photo diehards who were also there; the idiots shooting selfies carried on prancing and posing because the truth is that they don’t give a stuff about the beauty of the image).

We left the hotel at about 0930, with a general intention to drive the Icefield Parkway and a specific objective to arrive at the Icefield Discovery Centre at about 1300, as we had booked An Adventure!  The Parkway is billed as a hugely scenic drive, and it is – it is gated and you have to buy a permit in order to drive it (CAD 18 for us two seniors).  I was driving, and while our rental car’s Lane Assist function would have allowed me to take photos from behind the steering wheel, I thought it best to leave Jane to spot and take images whilst we were actually under way.  The scenery is, indeed, truly immense.

Every so often there is Something To See that’s off the road itself, and so we joined the stream of people stopping, leaping out of their cars, taking photos (even occasionally without themselves in them) and then leaping back behind the wheel and zooming off to the next Thing To See.  I’m being sardonic, here, but the sights are lovely, even if the photos are, by definition clichéd. For example, Bow Lake gives plenty of scope for photos conveniently near parking places.

In the above photo, you’ll notice a red-roofed building.  It turns out to have the endearing name of Num-Ti-Jah Lodge

and nearby there are several more nice views.

Further on is Peyto Lake, which offers some more wonderful views.

Like many of these roadside stops, it has toilets; these are basic unplumbed cabins with a stool and not much else. But the Peyto Lake ones had rather fetchingly been decorated.

More Big Scenery ensued

on the way to our next stop, the Mistaya Falls.  As well as being attractive, as most decent-sized waterfalls are,

these are unusual in the shape of the channel that the water has carved out for itself, which is very twisty.

The viewpoint also provides a morning workout on the walk back up to the car.

You’ll not be surprised to learn that the Big Scenery continued to wow us as we moved on

and it became clear that we were coming into Glacier Country.  There was the occasional distraction on the road,

but we made it unscathed to our Adventure!, which was hosted by the Columbia Icefields Discovery Centre.

We boarded a coach which took us a little way down the road, where we boarded a “snowbus”, (to, for, by, with or from snow) with Murray as our driver/guide.

These snowbuses are very specialised vehicles; there are only 25 in the world and 22 of them are here at the Columbia Icefield. (Since you ask, two of the others are in Churchill on Hudson Bay and the final one is in the Antarctic.) The terrain we would cover was not something any conventional vehicle could cross, so he bade us fasten our seatbelts and not stand up whilst he was driving, even though the typical speed was about 4 kph.  The designers were parsimonious in the extreme with the legroom allocated to each seat, so I was jammed in with no risk being dislodged by anything short of the sort of explosion which would have done for us all anyway; but I buckled up, as did everyone else; and we headed on to an actual glacier.  Looking out of the bus windows, we could just make out some figures on the ice

(see the little dots by that boulder?), and soon enough we trundled (slowly!) out onto the Athabasca Glacier, where we were allowed to step out on to the ice.

We were joined by other snowbuses from the centre

and pretty soon the bounded area we were permitted to roam was quite crowded.

Photo opportunities, unsurprisingly, abounded: close-ups of the Athabasca glacier higher up

displaying that wonderful blue colour that glaciers show (among all the dirt and rock they collect as they move); photos back to the Discovery Centre at the foot of the opposite side of the valley

where, incidentally, the Athabasca Glacier once reached, giving a clear insight into how much and how fast it is receding; and photos of various other glaciers

all of which are fed by the vast area of the Columbia Icefield – the largest area (200 sq.km) of glacial ice in the Canadian Rockies, the edge of which is visible as a layer in the above photo, and which extends back over the tops of the mountains.  An icefield, we learned, is different from a glacier – an icefield is stationary and the snow falling on it and being compressed under its own weight, feeds the glaciers, which move. The Columbia Icefield feeds five glaciers and meltwater from those glaciers feeds into three oceans – the Pacific, the Arctic and (if you include Hudson Bay as part of it) the Atlantic.

The Athabasca glacier is pretty swift. It moves 30 metres a year, apparently; but its replenishment is only 25 metres’ worth of glacier, so it is thinning and receding, as is almost every glacier in the northern hemisphere.

Having spent our 30 minutes on the glacier (including a very suspiciously-coloured patch of ice among the blue)

we got back into the snowbus and thence transferred to a coach that took us to the Skywalk

which I found a bit difficult to understand until I saw the meat of it:

a walkway jutting out from the cliff face – a remarkable feat of engineering.  The trail leading to it has some nice artistic touches

and enables views of the valley below

(that’s the Athabasca River, by the way). One then gets to walk out on to the glass floor of the Skywalk

after being careful to follow instructions.  It’s a sturdy glass floor

and the Skywalk offers some great views of the valley and some of the glaciers.

The Skywalk itself is pretty neat.

In the middle, back to camera and wearing a woolly hat, was a chap who was offering to take photos of people for them.  I think that was his job; if he was a professional photographer, he may well have been wondering what it was he did in a previous life that condemned him to such a role; but it gives people joy, so (through gritted teeth) good luck to them.

We were bussed back to the Discovery Centre, where we had a coffee and a last look at the glaciers in the surrounding area.

Above is the Snowdome; you can see the thick layer of ice on top of it, which goes to feed the glaciers.  We had a good view of the glacier we’d been on.

There, if you look carefully,

you can just make out the snowbus and its people.

It was as we queued for our coffee that we learned of the death of our Queen. Having generally kept up with developments, we’d known that this was not unexpected; but it was still sad news and we paused for a moment of reflection and respect.

As we drove on, there was – goodness me! – more Big Scenery. By this stage we had only two more planned stops, both waterfalls.  The first was the Sunwapta Falls

which, like the Mistaya Falls, were splendid without being spectacular, and finally the Athabasca Falls

which were a great deal bigger; something even an Icelander might make a foss about.

That was the final official Thing To See of the day as we made our way towards Jasper, but there was still some Big Scenery on view as we neared the town.

Our hotel was the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, a large and pleasant resort, with many attractive, if well-used, cabins spread across a wide area.  It was well after the cocktail hour by this stage, so we didn’t stop to take any photos of what looks like a very photogenic place; more in my next post.  Once we’d conquered the navigation of the site to find our room, we simply headed for the main lodge and a welcome drink and evening meal.  We had a small surprise on our walk back to our room, though:

A. Elk, who may or may not have a theory which is hers*

In fact there were four of them – two adult female elk and two younger ones – calmly helping themselves to the grass and shrubbery on offer.

On that interesting note, we ended the day.  It’s been a long one with a huge amount of fascinating things to see – with, fortunately, good weather and no smoke from the fires which are still affecting the area. So; since you appear to have made it this far, thank you for reading about it.  We may well have a quieter day tomorrow; please come back later and find out.

*  Monty Python sketch from the early 70s