Jasper Teaser.

This past weekend, a group of friends went out to Jasper to celebrate my friend Dominique's birthday. Ohhh the times we had...

Since I don't downhill ski, I spent the weekend exploring Jasper. I hadn't been there in years, and it was a delight to discover! Still much less commercial than Banff, and everything within walking distance of our hotel.

The quirks of the town...

The beautiful scenery...

The wildlife...

Glacial Lakes.

One of my favorite parts about going through the Rocky Mountains is the lakes.



Lake Louise. Oct 2011.



Most of the lakes in the Rockies are glacier-fed. As glaciers pass over rock, they grind it up into fine pieces called rock flour, which is released in melt water. Most of the rock flour settles to the bottom of the lake, but some of it remains suspended in the water.



Mt Burgess overlooking Emerald Lake. Aug 2011.

This suspended rock flour is very effective at scattering light, making the water in glacial lakes and rivers appear a milky-blue color (much the same as air particles scatter light to make the sky appear blue).





Abraham Lake. August 2011.



Suspended minerals also encourage small blue-green algae to grow, which gives these lakes their stunning turquoise appearance.













Natural Bridge over the Kicking Horse River. August 2011.

Chateau Lake Louise.

As I mentioned, this past weekend I was fortunate enough to attend a conference for Alberta Science teachers and it just so happened to be at the Fairmont's stunning Chateau Lake Louise.

Since I will probably never again be able to afford to stay there (thank you PD grant money!) I jumped at the opportunity. This hotel is stunning!

!!!!

This was the view from my room... Nothing like looking out over the emerald waters of Lake Louise at the Victoria glacier in the background. Lake Louise was named after Princess Louise Caroline Alberta (one of Queen Victoria's daughters) who was also the namesake of our province.

Beautifully clear lake, but sadly... clouds rolling in to block the glacier.

The Chateau was built at the end of the 19th century to try to lure wealthy railway travellers out west. While parts of the hotel burned down, were rebuilt and remodelled, it still retains a very old-fashioned look. This makes it very popular with wedding parties (an outdoor wedding occured while I was watching Jane Goodall speak. Who gets married outdoors in the mountains at the end of October?! Oh right. Last year I went to one on a mountaintop in February.)

Fuzzy picture of the lobby.

  I loved all the details of the hotel. The main lobby is full of tapestries, the ceilings in the old wing are all painted, and all the guest room doors are painted with a bouquet of flowers.



Ceiling in the Painter Wing.

I was supposed to room with two other friends, but one had to back out at the last minute. The plus side to this was our room was gorgeous! The bathroom was actually huge. We could have partied in there. Two full sized showers? Now that's luxury. And the beds? Don't even get me started. I've never loved a pillow so much in my life.

The flowers on our door.

If you ever get the opportunity to stay at the Fairmont's Chateau Lake Louise, I highly suggest you take it. It is an expensive hotel, but you definetly do get what you pay for!

Large ammonite fossils on display.

Small ammonite fossil I bought myself for a necklace.



Spiral Tunnels.

Anyone who has ever taken the Kicking Horse Pass through the Rockies (if you've driven the Trans-Canada, you've been through the Pass) will have seen the signs for the Spiral Tunnels. Most drivers pass right by, but many stop if only for the excuse to stretch their legs. Yet the Spiral Tunnels aare a fascinating part of Canadian history, and reveal the power of understanding simple machines.

Just west of the Continental Divide lies what was called "Big Hill" - a stretch where the railway needed to descend about 330m over a 16km straighway between the mountains. This may not seem like a very big deal, but it was the steepest part of the entire cross-Canada route. (According to the information signs at the lookout, the engine of a 5-car train would be a full 5m below the rear!) Trains travelling up the pass required twice as many engines to make it to the top. And even though safety switches were installed (the train equivalent of the truckers runaway lane) disasters were very common. The first train to ever use the completed line derailed, plunging into the river.

In order to save time, money and lives, an ingenius solution was devised; a new path would be created for the rail line by blasting into the mountains, no easy task in 1906. The track could loop around, extending the distance the train took to go from the summit to the valley floor (a spiral is the railway equivalent of a switchback). Two partial loops were excavated under Cathedral Mountain (called "Number One" and visible from the road up to Takakkaw Falls) and Mount Ogden ("Number Two" - the tunnel visible from the highway).

The highway running down the middle is the site of the original line.

The Spiral Tunnels are an example of a simple machine - in this case, the ramp or inclined plane. Using my awesome MS Paint skills, I will attempt to explain why an inclined plane creates a mechanical advantage.

In physics, work is not the same thing as effort, even though we tend to use the words interchangeably in every day life. (force is the closest approximation to effort) Work is the product of the amount of force needed to move an object over a certain distance and the distance moved. Whether you lift an object straight up, or slide it up a ramp, you do the same amount of work, since the height difference is the same in both cases.

The longer distance provided by the ramp means that it takes less effort to do the same amount of work (arrive at the same result). The engineers who designed the Spiral Tunnels needed to increase the distance travelled by the train to achieve this effect - they used a corkscrew pattern since they couldn't do it in a straight manner. (A screw is another simple machine... it is just a circular inclined plane).

By stretching out the distance, the trains experience a 22m elevation change for every kilometer of distance (a very safe rate compared to the extreme 45m of elevation per kilometer of Big Hill). In the case of the Tunnels, a sufficiently long train can actually pass over itself while it goes through the loop.



The engines are exiting the tunnel at the bottom, while the rear
of the train continues to enter up top.

Typically, when one stops at the Spiral Tunnels lookout, all one can see is some holes in the trees on the other side of the valley. When we stopped on the way back from Golden, we saw not one, not two, but three trains using the tunnels! It was very exciting (trust me)!

Alpine Flowers.

I took a lot of pictures of flowers while I was in the Rockies this past week. Partly because I like taking pictures of flowers, partly because they were everywhere, and partly because I didn't know what half of them were and wanted to be able to identify them when I got home. Summer was a bit delayed this year, so I was lucky that most of the June-July flowers were still out in August!

(My "trusty" plant book is Wild Flowers of Alberta, by R.G.H. Cormack. Reprinted in 1977. Inherited from who knows where. The pictures are a bit dodgy, so if I've misidentified anything, it's probably my fault, but I'll blame the book.)

Alpine Valley Plants: While these are not really technically "alpine" because I never saw them while I was on any mountains, red paintbrush is everywhere along the highways. I took this first shot along Icefields Parkway. (forcing Ken to pull over, because I was "worried we wouldn't see anymore". Well, there might have been about a 2km stretch with none...Cleary I don't go to the mountains in the summer much.) The thistle I found at Cedar Lake near Golden. There is also a ridiculous amount of Common Fireweed and Canadian Thistle and Ox-Eye Daisies all over the place.



Common Red Paintbrush





Bull Thistle



Mount 7 Plants: These next plants I found in a meadow at the top of Mount 7 (elevation 1942m). Mount 7 looks over Golden from the east, and you can drive up to almost the top, where there is a paraglider launch site. The field is very grassy, and chock full of Alpine Fireweed (shorter and redder than the common kind) and Ox-eye Daisies. In between, there are lots of little (less weedy) alpine plants. I was able to identify most of them, but there are a few that I have no idea what they are (which probably means they are not local). If anyone knows, please let me know!

(Thanks friends for the help identifying the plants! Think they're all accurate...)



Kudos to Kerstin for identifying this as
Northern Gentian! Good to have a horticulture
teacher for a friend!



Best guess is that these are some kind of dianthus...
Which is definetly not native, so who knows where
they came from - thanks Lindsay!





 









Mountain Goldenrod (foreground)



Thanks to Shawn who was able to
identify this as Round-Leaved Alumroot!







 





Bladder Campion






Common Nodding Onion



Tiny bumblebee (size of my pinky fingernail)
in an Ox-eye Daisy





Alpine Harebell













Bunchberry

 



Alpine Fireweed

 

Kicking Horse Mountain (Terminator Ridge): The summit of Kicking Horse Mountain is a lot higher up than the launch site on Mount 7 (elevation around 2,300m), and the ridges are a much harsher environment for a plant to grow in (much less a flowering plant! All those delicate parts...) As a result, the plants that do grow there tend to be hardy, slow growing, and smaller. Flowers are smaller and more scattered, but I was still pleasantly surprised by the amount and variety that I saw! There was some overlap in species between Terminator Ridge and CPR Ridge, but I only wanted to post pictures of each type once. 

We hiked the back side of Terminator Ridge, which was relatively sheltered (by Terminator Peak), and had lots of protected patches where tiny plants could grow (including ridiculous amounts of Saxifrage... it was everywhere!). I was able to identify all these plants, and I'm almost positive I got them all right!

Alpine Arnica



Purple Beard Tongue (?)







Common Stonecrop



Daisy Fleabane



Common Saxifrage





Alpine Phacelia



Mountain Sorrel



Wild Strawberry



 

Kicking Horse Mountain (CPR Ridge): CPR Ridge is much narrower, and doesn't have the shelter of a peak like Terminator Ridge. The plants I found there were much lower to the ground than the ones on the other ridge. Mostly there was lots of Mountain Heather. Mainly white, but some yellow (I didn't manage to take a decent picture of that).



White Mountain Heather





Golden Fleabane













I think the little white ones are Pygmy Flowers



Purple Beard Tongue and Pygmy Flowers??



(I would like to apologize for the dodgy-ness of some of these pictures... tiny plants on rock faces are sometimes hard to get to, and I am not a mountain goat.
I would also like to apologize for the ugliness of this post... moving these pictures around was a huge pain in the behind, so I kinda gave up on spacing them out nicely! I kept on accidentally deleting them, which involves lots of creative cursing and isn't good when you have to re-look up what they are! Sigh....)

Eagle's Eye.

This past week, I made an excursion to Golden with my brother to visit a friend and her husband who live there (plenty more on this later!).

One day, we took the gondola up Kicking Horse Mountain to do some hiking, and have lunch at the wonderful Eagle's Eye Restaurant (the same location as Carly's winter wonderland wedding).

Canada's Most Elevated Dining Experience.

Since the restaurant is located at the very top of the ski hill, it naturally has gorgeous views. (Three of the four walls in the dining room are floor to ceiling windows to showcase this!) Since we stopped in for a late lunch,  it wasn't very busy, and all the patrons had window seats.

Check out the view!

Since this is a fine dining establishment, the menu is quite fancy. If you want to check it out, I'd recommend lunch, as that menu is much more affordable than the dinner menu!

To start, I had a fabulous chai latte. Who would have thought to stir with rock candy?

Heaven in a mug... and on a stick.

For lunch, I had a blackened chicken wrap with corn salsa. It came with a mixed green salad and some of the most fantastic fries I've ever eaten in my life.

Both Ken and Carly ordered the charcuterie and cheese, which came on a gorgeous stone slate. The meat selection was a nice Mennonite sausage, some dried buffalo that was very similar to a pastrami (it was heavenly) and prosciutto. The cheeses were Camembert, brie and a very blue cheese.

I made Ken wait to eat until I took this picture.

We all thoroughly enjoyed our meals, and afterwards proceeded to hike around the ridges- maybe not the best idea after eating... Hindsight. Sigh. (more on the hiking later!)

The Eagle's Eye is a phenomenal restaurant located in some of the most stunning scenery in the Rockies. If you ever find yourself in the area, it's worth a check out!