Sometimes when bad things happen you can turn them into experiences of a lifetime. I was relatively young when the plant I was working at as Quality Supervisor shut its doors after over 100 years of operation. I took my severance package and seeing that I was not tied down to returning at a given time I packed up the van and headed to Alaska from my home in New England. I took my elderly parents with me since they had both recently retired paying them back for all of the family trips they took us kids on when we were young. We headed north up through Vermont passing over the border to Montreal. You can click the links for more in depth posts on each attraction. In Quebec we picked up the Trans Canada Highway and headed west averaging 600 miles per day.
Into Alaska and the end of the Alaska Highway at Delta Junction and then on our way to Tok where a meal of caribou sausage and salmon chowder in a bread bowl was our welcome to the state.
Instead of repeating the route south along the Alaska Highway we took the Cassiar Highway south. We passed by Bear Glacier and made our way to the charming communities of Stewart, British Columbia and Hyder Alaska.
Badlands National Park was next on the agenda. This again was one of my mother’s favorite parks as it was a setting of many of her historical fiction novels she liked to read.
A visit to my aunt and uncle in Cohoes, New York and then home. It was good to see New England and home after many months on the road but the memories of the trip will last a life time. My parents would both pass in a few years and I was glad I could give them this trip in their final years.
Banff National Park is Canada’s oldest national park, established in 1885. Located in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains Banff encompasses 2,564 sq miles of mountainous terrain, with many glaciers and ice fields, dense coniferous forest, and alpine landscapes. The Icefields Parkway extends from Lake Louise, Alberta to Jasper National Park in the north. The parks together along with the surrounding area form the Canadian Rocky Mountain UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Over the past few million years, glaciers have at times covered most of the park, but today are found only on the mountain slopes. The Columbia Icefield is the largest uninterrupted glacial mass in the Rockies. You can walk out onto the glacier but be sure to bring sunglasses. I neglected to bring a pair and the resulting snow blindness gave me the worst headache I ever had in my life.
The walk up to what is now the foot of the glacier gives you a real sense of the effects of Global Warming as the markers indicate how far the glacier has receded in the last few decades.
The power of the glaciers can be seen in the grooves carved into the granite rocks.
Jasper National Park is a national park in Alberta, Canada. It is the largest national park within Alberta’s Rocky Mountains spanning 11,000 4,200 sq mi. Its location is north of Banff National Park and west of Edmonton. The park contains the glaciers of the Columbia Icefield, springs, lakes, waterfalls and mountains and is a part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Icefields Parkway is a highway 140 mi in length from Lake Louise, Alberta in Banff National Park, to Jasper, Alberta. The highway parallels the continental divide, providing motor access to the mountains.
The Trans-Canada Highway is a transcontinental federal-provincial highway system that travels through all ten provinces of Canada from the Pacific Ocean on the west to the Atlantic on the east. The main route spans 4,860 miles across the country, one of the longest routes of its type in the world. The highway system is recognizable by its distinctive white-on-green maple leaf route markers. On our road trip up the Alaska Highway we made our way from our home in New England to Montreal where we caught the Trans Canada Highway heading west. Driving through Quebec and into Ontario we reached the midpoint of the Trans Canada.
A truly awe inspiring part of the drive was going along the north shore of Lake Superior. Realizing that you are seeing a freshwater lake and not an ocean gives you even more of a sense of wonder.
Many scenic wonders in Ontario but we couldn’t stop as we were on to Alaska.
but first a stop at the West Edmonton Mall which at the time of our trip was the largest mall in the world. Today it is not even in the top ten!
Someone once said the best way to see a country is to drive through it and I wholeheartedly agree. We really did not do the trip justice as we were on our way to Alaska but it was still an experience I will always cherish.