GO! Girls Outdoors

You’ve just got to love a road trip, especially when it exposes you to some of the most spectacular scenery in the world.  We met an enthusiastic fellow on a train in Toronto who said, ‘once you get to the Rockies, you can just hold the camera up and click and you’ll get a postcard shot’.  He was right - I’ve seen it before and remember it as such, but it’s hard to remember just how amazingly beautiful it is until you go back and see it again.

From Sioux Lookout, Dave and I caught the train across to Edmonton, Alberta then hired a car for the drive to Calgary.  We got an upgrade from the tiny, cost effective tin can that we booked to a bigger car, a Kia Something or Other (I’m not big on cars).   When we saw our car, we looked at each other with our eyes glinting and our eyebrows bopping up and down (an ‘are you thinking what I’m thinking’ moment) and immediately renamed it the Kia Sleepover, for reasons that will remain unknown to the car rental company.  That’s right - it turned out that (hypothetically) you could put down the back seat, fold up the middle seats and then stretch out luxuriously in the back, as long as you were 5 feet tall and didn’t mind your bum sinking into the gap where the seats didn’t quite meet up.  If a person (or two people for that matter) were to sleep in the car, they might find that the sub zero temperatures outside would lead to a coating of ice on the insides of the windows.  If said people were to stuff the gap between the seats with backpacks and clothing, they might find that the bum-sinking could be minimised, and if the people were both around 6 feet tall they might find that a fraction more room could be created by angling the front seats forward.  They also might find that the Canadian Rockies are very quiet at this time of year, and if they parked late and rose early then they might have a little more cash to spend on beer and wings at the local pub where the hockey might or might not be playing.  All hypothetically, of course.   

We decided to take a week to drive from Edmonton to Calgary, much to the confusion of more than a couple of people who looked worried and informed us that it was only a 3 hour drive between Edmonton and Calgary, and that it was actually really boring.  That’s probably true if you go direct - but we went via Jasper, Golden, Invermere, Banff and Canmore which put us right in the middle of the Canadian Rockies for the week.  As a wise man once said, it’s all about the journey, and as another wise man once said, porridge tastes better when you eat it in front of a beautiful view. 

On the course of our journey we travelled through (and ate pasta and porridge in view of) the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site and the four interlocking National Parks that make it up - Jasper, Banff, Kootenay and Yoho.  These parks, along with several other parks and wilderness areas are part of the Yellowstone to Yukon wildlife corridor that stretches all the way from the US to the Yukon in far northern Canada.  This corridor provides animals with a safe area to travel through, and there are even wildlife underpasses and overpasses to help them cross the busier highways.  It is a vast area of wilderness and we saw elk, bighorn sheep, wolves and a fox just by driving through the place.  We heard rumours of bears and saw moose tracks and evidence of caribou, but no sightings yet.

A big highlight of the drive was definitely the Icefields Pathway.  The scenery is almost overwhelming and it’s difficult to know where to look.  I’ve done the drive a few times and I think that this trip was the most spectacular I’ve seen it - clear blue skies, snow covered peaks and the sun illuminating the glaciers.  I’m going to have to check my photos when I get back to Australia, but I’d almost be willing to bet that the glaciers in the Icefields are smaller than they were 5 years ago.  I find this depressing and frightening, that even over a short period in my lifetime I can see detrimental changes in the environment - and I am in disbelief that some people still don’t believe in climate change and global warming.

Nevertheless - we had a fantastic trip.  We saw lots of animals, soaked in hot springs, admired the beautiful scenery, went hiking, met some great people and had meals in a lot of spectacular places.  It was cold overnight but beautiful during the day.  I left a GO! Girls Outdoors paper trail in all the outdoor stores I could find, and met lots of people who were enthusiastic about the project - after all, if you want an outdoor adventure then you really can’t go past BC and western Alberta.  This is an overview - there are a couple more adventure stories coming, so keep watching the blog and if you like it and the website, tell everyone you know!  Until next time…

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