Romeo And Juliet

By our tradition, it is de rigueur to stop by the Greenleaf Restaurant in Ashland, Oregon for marionberry pancakes. (Heavens, they’re tasty!)

We also like to check out the summer offerings from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This year’s program features Romeo And Juliet. I’ve heard that this play is about love. I know that there are different kinds of love. There’s family love, which I have in spades. There is love of this world and the precious planet we live on. (We need to see more of that.) There’s also romantic love, which I don’t know very much about but it seems like it can make people both happy and sad. One thing for sure- I would not want to have anything to do with a love where you have to kill yourself at the end of the play.

The Eye Of My Apple

Washington’s Yakima Valley is “home” to my favorite fruit snack- the apple. What I mean is that it’s a major apple growing region, so passing through here felt like a pilgrimage.

I used to believe that the Apple Goddess (health conscious cousin of the Ice Cream Goddess) dwelt at the summit of Mt. Rainier, bestowing her blessings on those of us below. Now, I am pretty sure that her spirit lives here as well as at countless grocery stores and farmer’s markets around the world.

Northern Sky

British Columbia’s Mt. Robson (3,954 m) is the highest point in the Canadian Rockies. It’s quite a sight from the visitor center in its namesake provincial park, so we really didn’t need to hike to it. I’ve noticed that the mountains around here really stand out. There’s no question that you’re in the presence of something really big.

By the way, this spot is the farthest north I’ve been to in my life so far (almost 53 degrees north according to the map). It feels like I’m at the ends of the earth, but in fact I am much closer to Davis, California than to the North Pole.

Athabasca Falls

One of the coolest sights in Canada’s Jasper National Park is this waterfall on the Athabasca River. It’s not very tall but you can see that there’s a huge amount of water flowing through. Kind of a miniature Niagara Falls. The water is a glacier-fed turquoise color. Beautiful!

Mount Edith Cavell

We had a great hike in the shadow of Mt. Edith Cavell (3,363 m) in Jasper National Park. It’s easily the most visible peak in the park and it features the Angel Glacier, which looks to be spreading its wings from certain angles (look it up on Google and you’ll see what I mean). It’s a beautiful and dramatic area.

The peak is named for Edith Cavell (1865-1915), a British nurse who was executed by the Germans during World War I. I’ve noticed while traveling up here that Canada shows many of its British Commonwealth roots. Queen Elizabeth II is on the money and there’s even a mountain named for Winston Churchill. The United States has lots of peaks named after people, but this is the first one I’ve encountered that’s named for a woman. Very progressive.

The Iceman Cometh

O.K., I have something to proclaim. The Icefields Parkway is arguably the most extraordinarily scenic drive in North America. It goes for 233 km through Banff and Jasper National Parks in the Canadian Rockies. Huge glaciers are fed by the magnificent Columbia Icefield (which is behind me in the photo). Some of the rivers fed by all that frozen water flow all the way to the Arctic Ocean.

I urge you to try this drive at least once in your life.

Alberta

Today we entered Canada. It’s the third time I’ve been to this country. I think it’s a great place. We stopped by Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site (cool name) for a repeat visit. I mentioned this place in an earlier post from 2018. Taking a walk around the site, looking out at the boundless prairie was neat. What I really liked was finding wild roses on the trail. They are the symbol of Alberta.

Changes

Wow! The weather in Montana can change on a dime. That’s me overlooking the Missouri River near Helena with scary rain, lightning and thunder in the background. Half an hour before this photo was taken we were drying out our tent and sleeping bags under a hot sun. An hour later, we were driving north under sunny skies with puffy white clouds.

Dad was hoping to catch a lightning bolt in this picture, but alas that did not work out.

The Peaceful Atom

As we drove through southeastern Idaho, we passed through isolated federal government lands of the Idaho National Laboratory. We made a stop at a museum dedicated to the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1 (EBR-I), the world’s first nuclear reactor to produce usable amounts of electricity. It was the early 1950s and the United States had just ended a war with nuclear weapons, engaged in a Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union, and we were wondering what to do next. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his “atoms for peace” speech in which he called for a new way of thinking about how to use this awesome power.

The museum was cool, but it had an air of boosterism about it. There was a mention of how Three Mile Island actually didn’t melt down, but we didn’t see anything about Chernobyl or Fukushima. Gotta tell the whole story I always say.

Walking On The Moon

Craters Of The Moon National Monument in Idaho. I really liked this out-of-the-way spot as a place to camp and hike. It’s basically a giant lava field that’s many times the size of my other favorite similar spot, Lava Beds National Monument in California. It’s one of the reasons that the Oregon Trail was routed south of the Snake River. That’s because wagons couldn’t handle the terrain, although crossing the river had its own dangers. I was last here in 2005 with my brother and father. I wonder why it took 18 years for a return trip.

As I’m whizzing along in a car, I always think about how the ground we’ve covered in a few days on this trip would have taken the wagon trains of the 19th century many months.