The drive south was, as it had been when we drove west from Edmonton into Jasper National Park, spectacular. The sky was blue. The weather was sunny. The temperature was 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (or upper thirties and forties if you do archaic and illogical Fahrenheit), As we drove south we saw the monumental mountains of the Canadian Rockies with their spectacular green, brown, and black pine forests, mountains and forests made even more spectacular by the blue background of the sky which they were foregrounded against. We saw turquoise rivers, turquoise lakes, glaciers, and finally, as we neared Lake Louise, the famous Canadian larches of Monty Python fame.
By early evening we had made it to the Columbia Icefields and its camp ground. So we reversed our camping and campground ritual. We unloaded the car, put up the tent, and ate. Before going to bed we visited the famous glacier that helps give the icefields its name. The glacier even then was melting in the face of climate change. Wooden markers with dates noted showed where the glacier had been years before and where it had retreated to in the early 1990s when we were there.
We then returned to the campground from the icefields but we quickly learned that the glacier was not done with us for the evening. It was a cold evening, colder than we had been used to during our September sojourn in the beautiful Canadian Rockies of Jasper National Park, since, or so local folklore has it, the cold winds blew off of the nearby glaciers and directly into the campground and into our tent.
The next day we drove to Lake Louise, where we stayed, if memory serves for four days. We set up our camp in the Lake Louise public campground. We woke up the next day and did our other camping ritual. We hiked. We hiked up a mountain trail that took off from the northwest edge of Lake Louise. About halfway up we stopped at the Lake Agnes tea house for some scones, soup, and tea. Replenished we once again headed up the mountain to see the famous and world renowned larches of the Canadian Rockies. When we reached the top meadow there were others there who had done the hike up before us and who now served as replacement trees for the many birds that landed on their shoulders and their arms looking, one presumes, for food.
After staying on top of the mountain for a while we, unlike the German hikers we met who went on to other mountain tops, hiked down the mountain. We descended to Lake Louise with its hordes of Japanese tourists hiking around the lake on mostly level ground and finally ended our hike at the parking lot of the also famous Lake Louise chateau where we had parked so we could do our hike.
From there we drove over to the Lake Louise Village Centre. It was there that it happened, the event that almost made me die laughing. An older couple started their car and the horn immediately started blaring and wouldn’t stop. The male driver apparently flustered seemed to think that the horn problem could be solved by driving around the village of Lake Louise. From the parking lot you could hear the horn blaring north, south, east, and west and could follow its journey around the tiny village and eventually back to the parking lot where me, Lea, and a host of others listening and likewise following the car’s odyssey were almost dying of tear stained laughter.
After the show we got in the car, went back to the campground, ate, and went to bed. The next day we took down the tent, packed the car, ate, and headed south to Banff for further adventures, none of them as joyous and hilarious as the car with the ever beeping horn making its way around Lake Louise, however.
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