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So today was pretty amazing, scenery-wise.
I know that many of my western-North America based friends will be jaded with mountains by now, and that the pictures I took today will mean little, but today was even better than yesterday, despite it being even more driving, for the second day in a row.
I was a little bit pissed early on, because you need to pay to use highway 93, the Icefields Parkway. I was feeling a little smug and self-satisfied that I wasn't going to have to pay a single toll in Canada to use roads, since I didn't know they had them, but this made up for it by being one of, if not THE most singular experience of my trip so far. the mountains were amazing, and if some of the shots look a little samey, I can only apologize because they did NOT look samey when I was taking them.
By far the coolest part of the day, and the experience I'm talking about, however, was climbing up to the Athabasca Glacier in between Jasper and Banff. I hadn't known it was able to be climbed beforehand, and although I didn't have enough time to wait for one of the tours that actually went on TOP of the glacier, going straight up to it was amazing in and of itself. You start off at an already fairly high elevation in the parking lot, and pretty much go straight up a gravel path for about a kilometer. As you near the top of the path and the bottom of the glacier, the temperature has dropped about fifteen degrees, the wind has picked up to the point where you need to take off your cap so it doesn't blow away, you can't breathe any more, since the air is far thinner, and you can smell the ice, which is an odd thing to be thinking.
I hope that at least ONE of my siblings, and possibly my friends, pick up on the combination picture-blog title chrono trigger joke which I spent like fifteen minutes setting up, and then had the gentleman who I had recruited to take my picture take three photos, all of which contained both of his thumbs. It is a funny joke, although I have no magic tab to dispense. We don't get Tab in Canada anyway.
After the glacier, which quite literally took my breath away, I didn't take very many more pictures of the mountains, because they all sort of paled in my mind to the experience of the glacier. They were all amazing, don't get me wrong, I just sort of didn't care at that point. I did get a shot of the family of ungulates who held up traffic for about 10 minutes just east of Jasper, but they declined to pose in a convenient way, so I just hurriedly snapped that one.
I ended the day in Edmonton, at the house of a friend of a friend of a friend (don't ask), Jason Wong, and his girlfriend Nicole. We had a great evening playing Dominion, a game I will have to possibly pick up, moving beds around, and watching their friend Adam complete his PHD thesis while we gamed.
Tomorrow is the Gretzky statue, the West Edmonton Mall, and a trip to Airdrie to see James and Trish.
Cheers!
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