Kokanee National Park

The next day we got up, broke camp and headed over the Continental Divide to Kokanee National Park, which is directly south of Yoho. On the way we saw the above mountain goats right next to the highway. Everyone had slowed down and was out taking photos. There were supposed to be mountain goats at Hamilton Lake, but we never saw any. After getting down into Lake Louise Village we went back over the Continental Divide into Kokanee National Park and the Stanley Glacier hike.

This hike was only 8.6 km with 300 meters of vertical rise. It started in the remains of a burned forest. The fire was in 1968, but the burned stumps and trees still hadn't decomposed and there were few baby lodgepole pine, evidence of how hard the climate is. However, the open slopes allowed for amazing wildflowers - Indian paintbrush, columbine, roses and lots of things I couldn't identify. The hike was very gradual until we got up into the glacial valley at the base of the Guardwall (see above). If you look carefully, you will see a cloud of dust in the center which was a very large rock fall. The trail continued up the valled to its head where three branches of Stanley Glacier hung above us. There were waterfalls all over the edges, some disappearing into thin air because of the wind.

This phot shows two of the lobes of Stanley Glacier. There was a large moraine below which we did not climb, though there was an unmaintained trail to the base of the ice fields.

As we headed back out, we could see the mountains across the highway and down the U-shaped glacial valley. We drove on to Calgary on the Trans Canada and then headed south to Fort Macleod on our way back to Montana.

We have been making tracks since the Canadian Rockies. We have crossed three time zones in four days and are now back in Ontario near Thunder Bay. The first day we went south to Montana and headed across US 2 to Glasgow Montana. The next day we continued on US 2 to Larimore Dam (25 miles west of Grand Forks, ND). Today we went across Minnesota and up to International Falls where we crossed back into Canada where we plan to go around the north shore of Lake Superior. We've had four long days of driving and I'm looking forward to slowing down in the next few days as we head to Sault St. Marie and down the east side of Michigan and then across southern Ontario to Tunkhannock PA. The drives have been beautiful in a quiet way. It's been very wet (there was standing water all over N.D.) and the fields are all very green. There are a lot of rolling hills, so it isn't all flat. Minnesota, as its motto says, is the land of 10,000 lakes.