Vagabond Tracks — by Paul & Amy

5-7 July:  After buying a new spare tire for the car to replace a flat we got on Obstruction Point road, we left the Olympic peninsula and headed to the North Cascades, where we would spend the next couple of days hiking on national park, national forest, and state park trails.  The Thunder Knob trail (North Cascades National Park) was a pleasant hike up to a ridgetop view of Diablo Lake and surrounding snow-covered mountain peaks.  The Sauk Mountain trail (Baker/Snoqualmie National Forest) started up near treeline in wildflower-studded meadows and the view from the summit was very rewarding for a fairly easy hike.  We had done this hike about seven years ago on a cloudy day without any distant views, so the hike was well worth repeating.  Short interpretive trails in Rasar State Park (where we were camped) and nearby Rockport State Park were very attractive in addition to being informative, winding through old growth forests and beside the Skagit River.

8-10 July:  We had already become familiar with western red cedars from hiking in the San Juan islands and Washington’s North Cascades (as well as from reading Boys in the Boat), but once we got into southern British Columbia, it felt like we had entered the heartland of this stately species.  Our campsite in Golden Ears Provincial Park was in a handsome forest of cedars about a foot to a foot and a half in diameter—tall and straight, without much undergrowth in their dense shade.  Scattered among these trees, however, were stumps six to eight feet or more in diameter, bearing witness to how truly magnificent the original old growth forest must have been before the arrival of Canadian lumberjacks.

We spent about half a day in the Museum of Anthropology, on the campus of the University of British Columbia.  Though the museum covers a variety of cultures, it focuses primarily on the native people of the Northwest Coast (Washington, British Columbia, and southern Alaska).  Northwest coast natives included many different tribes and languages.  These people are probably best known for their totem poles, carved from large western red cedar trees.  Totem poles were developed into a distinctive art form, with colorful and stylized symbols of various animals, both real and legendary.  Equally impressive were their baskets, woven in intricate geometric patterns using materials from a wide variety of reeds, roots, bark, and wood.  Some were so tightly woven that they were used to hold water, so they had no need to develop pottery.  Abundant food resources from both forest and sea in this region made possible a sedentary life without the need for agriculture, enabling the development of such highly refined arts.

At our niece Kathy’s wedding, we had met her husband Bahrad’s parents, Shahob and Giti.  They had invited us to visit them if our travels ever took us to Vancouver, so this year we took them up on their offer and spent a delightful evening with them in their North Vancouver home.  Originally from pre-revolutionary Iran, they lived in Michigan and then several years in Saskatchewan before moving to B.C.  They treated us to a scrumptious home-cooked Persian style dinner and the evening gave us a nice chance to get to know them better.

The next day we explored a couple of short hiking trails near our campground in Golden Ears PP.  Walking in the quiet western red cedar forest, with waterfall, mountain, and lake views, was a pleasant change from commuting into Vancouver’s hectic city traffic.  On the Lower Falls trail we met a couple originally from Columbia, now settled in B.C., who invited us to their campsite after hiking.  We spent a couple of enjoyable hours with them and their friends, originally from India, while sharing Columbian coffee, Indian tea, and Persian cookies (a gift from Giti the night before), discussing all sorts of topics from our varied perspectives.

11-12 July:  For our bike ride in British Columbia, we chose the Myra Canyon section of the Kettle Valley Railway trail.  As we drove toward our camping destination at Bear Creek Provincial Park, we traveled through thick haze from scores of active wildfires in interior B.C. (between the Cascades and the Rockies).  Signs warned of highway closures to our north.  There were campfire bans and some towns were even under a ban to sell or refill propane canisters to campers.  From our campsite on the shore of Lake Okanagan, we could barely see across to the other side.  Fortunately, the air cleared considerably overnight for our ride the next day.

The Kettle Valley Railway was constructed during 1910-1916 to transport silver, copper, and agricultural products to the coast.  The railway declined in the 1960s and the rails were removed in the 1970s.  In the early 1990s, through the efforts of the Myra Canyon Trestle Restoration Society, the route was turned into a popular rail trail for bikers, hikers, and equestrians.  The section through steep-sided Myra Canyon includes 18 trestles, two tunnels, and breathtaking scenery.  In 2003, just a few months after this section was designated as a National Historic Site of Canada, a large wildfire devastated the forest and destroyed 14 of the 18 trestles.  Thanks to national and provincial funding, this popular trail was completely restored under the direction of the founding volunteer organization, the MCTRS.  Trailside signs explain many interesting historical structures and natural history features along the route.  We felt that our 22 km (round trip) ride through the canyon was perhaps the most dramatic section of rail trail that we have biked on yet.

13-15 July:  From southern B.C., we dipped south into eastern Washington to visit Amy’s sister Barb and her husband Dan in Chewelah and Amy’s brother Bill and his wife Deb in Spokane.  When we visited Barb and Dan two years ago, they were living in central Nevada, but now they have retired and moved back to Chewelah, where they had lived for several years while their daughters were growing up.  We went into town to have ice cream for lunch at Chataqua, the local fair.  There we met up with Susan, who was introduced to us by our mutual friend Kathy on a cross-country ski outing last winter back in N.H.  When Susan said she lives in Washington, we discovered that she lives only a few miles from Amy’s sister.  Susan was able to arrange a resupply trip home during her long distance hike on the Pacific Northwest Trail to coincide with our visit with Barb and Dan.

The next day Dan and Bill joined us for a bike ride along the Spokane River on the Centennial Trail, a paved pedestrian and bike path.  The part of the trail that we biked on winds through areas of grassland and scattered pine trees along the river, with one section along residential streets and then a dedicated bike lane as we got closer to downtown Spokane.  Afterward we spent time visiting with Bill and Deb before returning to Chewelah.

16 July:  Heading east, we passed through the Idaho panhandle into Montana at Lookout Pass.  This was one of the original ski areas in the U.S. (rope tow installed in 1936 and officially opened in 1938) and is one of three ski areas in the country where skiers can ski in two states.  There we picked up some information on a bike trail that we’d like to explore on a future trip (the Hiawatha).  Today, however, we pushed on to a rendezvous with “Old Fogey” friends Rob and Judith, who had traveled from Maine in their camper to meet us at Seeley Lake in Lolo National Forest to begin three weeks of camping, hiking, and biking together in the Rockies of Montana, Alberta, and B.C.

17 July:  We biked along the Clark Fork River in Missoula on the Kim Williams Nature Trail and the Milwaukee Road rail trail.  These trails, partly on gravel and partly on asphalt, gave us a pleasant way to pass the time while our car was being checked out because some dashboard warning lights had come on the day before (no problems were found, though).

18 July:  We relocated to Great Falls, where we went to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center.  This little museum, run by the U.S. Forest Service, has excellent exhibits and videos that easily captured our attention for a couple of hours.  The Great Falls of the Missouri River were about at the midpoint of the the Corps of Discovery’s westward journey and proved to be a much more formidable obstacle than Lewis and Clark had anticipated.  The boats and supplies had to be portaged around this series of five major waterfalls, which took over two weeks rather than the expected one day.

19 July:  Before leaving Great Falls, we visited the C.M. Russell Museum.  Charlie Russell (1864-1926) was one of America’s most celebrated western painters and sculptors.  He had firsthand experience working as a cowpuncher back in the days when the West was still pretty wild, beginning in the early 1880s.  Largely self-taught as an artist, his art captured the excitement and romance of a way of life that was rapidly dying out during his lifetime.  In 1897 Russell met Olaf Carl Seltzer (1877-1957), a talented Danish artist who became a close friend of his and whose influence was evident in Russell’s later paintings.  We had the benefit of a short personal tour from Carol Seltzer, a museum volunteer whose husband is a grandson of O.C. Seltzer.  Besides works by Russell and Seltzer, the museum displays paintings, sculptures, and photographs by others, plus an exhibit about buffalo (bison) and one on historical western firearms.  We were all very impressed with what this museum has to offer.

20-23 July:  Glacier National Park in Montana consists of large sedimentary mountains that have been carved extensively by glaciation, which left behind bowl-shaped cirques, U-shaped valleys, jagged knife-edge ridges, and sharp peaks.  The large continental glaciers are long gone, but there are still remnant mountain glaciers clinging to the steep mountain walls high above the valleys.  The park has several long lakes filled with water of a vibrant turquoise blue color, due to the very fine-grained “glacial flour” suspended in the water flowing from the melting glaciers (as rocks trapped in a moving glacier scrape against the bedrock below, they produce a fine powder).  The steepness of the valley walls makes for some very scenic waterfalls, such as St. Mary Falls and Virginia Falls, which we hiked to on our first day in Glacier.  We had now been joined by a third “Old Fogies Outing Club” couple, Dick and Sonia, who would be traveling with Rob & Judith and us for the next three weeks in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, Alberta, and B.C.

Amy and I had vacationed 40 years ago in Glacier Park, and we enjoyed leading our friends on one of our favorite hikes from our previous trip, through Siyeh Pass.  The trail wound through meadows filled with the distinctive tall white plumes of beargrass flowers, as well as many other kinds of wildflowers, and then climbed above treeline, where the wind was very strong, passed above a large snowfield, went through the pass, and descended through another valley with views of Sexton Glacier, one of the remaining glaciers in the park.  There are about two dozen left, and at their projected rate of retreat there may not be any left in another 10 or 15 years.

Another hike took us through a forest of large old growth western red cedar trees and up to Avalanche Lake nestled in a glacial cirque.  On our final day in Glacier, we hiked from the historic Many Glacier Hotel past Josephine Lake and up toward Grinnell Glacier.  One entertaining spot on the trail cools hikers off as they pass directly through a waterfall.

24-26 July:  Leaving Montana, we headed north into Alberta and spent a couple of days exploring the southern part of Banff National Park.  The town of Banff is a very attractive (and very busy) tourist destination in the Bow River valley, situated between high mountains of sharply tilted sedimentary rocks.  We rode our bikes along the Spray River Trail on the west side of the majestic Mt. Rundle, which was in full view directly from our campsite.  The next day we took one of the most popular short hikes in this area, to views of large waterfalls in Johnston Canyon.  Continuing farther up the trail, we managed to leave a lot of the crowd behind as we hiked to the Ink Pots.  Those are pools of water fed by upwelling spring water, which creates interesting patterns that are continually shifting in the sediment at the bottom of the pools.

27 July:  Kootenay is in B.C., on the western side of the continental divide.  We did one day hike there while still camped in Banff.  On a number of previous days in B.C., Montana, and Alberta we had traveled through thick haze due to distant wildfires.  The morning of our hike in to Stanley Glacier was the worst we had yet seen.  Not only were the views very limited, but the smell of smoke was constant.  We hiked up the Stanley Creek valley between two tall, steep-sided mountains into a glacial cirque.  This valley is known for its Burgess Shale formations, which contain fossils about 500 million years old, and also for the Stanley Glacier, perched high above the creek on a north-facing slope.  The smoke haze began to clear in the afternoon and we hiked further up the valley beyond the official end of the trail on well-worn paths up to a wooded shelf with a good view of Stanley Glacier above it.

On our way to the hike and back to our campsite, we saw a few of the state-of-the-art wildlife overpasses that have been constructed in the Bow River valley across the Trans Canada Highway.  These structures are being constructed to provide continuous corridors between prime wildlife habitat areas in the Canadian Rockies for such species as grizzly bears, elk, deer, wolves, moose, and mountain lions, as well as smaller mammals.  Monitoring day and night by remote cameras has shown that they are being used extensively, thus preventing numerous collisions that would have inevitably resulted from the high volume of car and truck traffic.

28 July and 1 August:  Before and after our visit to Canada’s Glacier National Park (to be described in the next post), we spent a couple of days in Yoho National Park in B.C.  This park includes Kicking Horse Pass, part of the route selected by the Canadian Pacific Railway in building the transcontinental railroad in the mid-1880s.  Although Canada was created in 1867, B.C. did not join at that time.  The Canadian Prime Minister promised a transcontinental railroad linking B.C. to eastern Canada as an incentive to become the fifth Canadian province, which it did in 1881.  Kicking Horse Pass (named when the head surveyor was kicked in the chest by his horse) was chosen by CPR for their route through the Rocky Mountains despite being higher and steeper than the alternate route proposed through Yellowhead Pass to the north.  The route west of Kickinghorse Pass at the Continental Divide was so steep (a 4.5 percent grade known as “The Big Hill”) that there were three runaway sidings for descending.  Trains had to be reconfigured with extra engines and fewer cars to climb to the pass from the west.  After 24 years, a gentler route was built by building two “Spiral Tunnels” in which the trains made a 360-degree loop within each tunnel and emerged near where it had entered but at a different level.  The Spiral Tunnel route is still used today, and we visited a highway overlook above one pair of tunnel entrances with a detailed set of historical signboards.

We also hiked the Walk in the Past interpretive trail that crosses the modern rail line and highway and climbs to the old Big Hill grade (now a gravel road).  It led to one of the runaway sidings, where an old small gauge locomotive that was used in the construction of the Spiral Tunnels lies abandoned and rusting.

The Trans-Canada Highway also passes through Kickinghorse Pass, but there was an earlier two-lane highway that is now abandoned and closed to cars but open to bicycles.  We biked on that and stopped near a large log arch over the road at the Great Divide between B.C. and Alberta.  An overgrown interpretive trail from there led to a monument beside the railroad tracks (describing the kicking horse incident) and also to a small creek that divides into two branches, one flowing into the Pacific via the Columbia River and the other flowing into the Atlantic via the Saskatchewan River and Hudson Bay.

29-31 July:  Canada also has a Glacier National Park (not to be confused with the American park in Montana), in B.C. west of the continental divide.  The Rocky Mountain parks in Canada were all created about when the transcontinental railway began bringing tourists in 1886.  To help finance building the transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific Railway built luxurious hotels to bring tourists to see the grand scenery of the Rocky Mountains.  One of these was Glacier House, built in the style of some of the great hotels in the Swiss Alps.  They also hired Swiss mountaineers to build hiking trails and guide tourists on alpine climbing excursions, advertising the area as North America’s version of the Alps.  CPR’s transcontinental railway, completed in 1885, crossed the Selkirk mountain range at Rogers Pass, with a grade not much less steep than the route through Kickinghorse Pass to the east.  About 1910, a 10-mile-long tunnel was completed to bypass the steep Rogers Pass route.  The Glacier House hotel went out of business in the 1920s and was dismantled.  Now the former hotel site is the nucleus of a great set of hiking trails (many of them dating back to the Glacier House’s glory days in the 1880s and 1890s).  Glacier National Park is truly spectacular, and our three days of hiking there led us into some unforgettable mountain scenery.